Missing in Antiwar Action

[rodeodance]

interesting answers he poses.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/01/19/AR2007011901619.html


Missing in Antiwar Action

By John McMillian
Saturday, January 20, 2007; 12:00 AM

Recently I finished teaching a freshman seminar at Harvard called "From Reform to Revolution: Youth Culture in the 1960s." When I built the syllabus, I asked students to ponder a single, overarching question: "How did the youth rebellion of the 1960s happen?" That is, what caused millions of young people to pierce the bland and platitudinous din that characterized the early Cold War years? Why did so many youths -- many of them affluent and college-educated -- suddenly decide that American society needed to be radically overhauled?

But as the semester progressed, my students frequently turned the question around: Why is there no rising protest movement among young people today? At the very least, they asked, shouldn't we be seeing more antiwar activity? According to a CNN poll this month, 67 percent of Americans oppose the war in Iraq, and more than half would like to see all U.S. troops home by year's end. Given that it was not until August 1968 that a majority of Americans began calling the Vietnam War a "mistake," this is a remarkable statistic. By 1968, of course, antiwar teach-ins, sit-ins and marches were commonplace on many campuses; demonstrators had violently clashed with soldiers on the steps of the Pentagon; and the Democratic National Convention had descended into chaos over the war.

Today, grass-roots antiwar activism has not been entirely absent. But one would be hard-pressed to argue that we're on the cusp of a rising protest movement. Why not?

First,,

[DURHAM D]

1. They are all busy on the internets talking about taking action.

Also, no draft, no skin in the game, no real anger.

[OneBlueSky]

2. what's missing from the analysis is the corporate media's treatment of the war . . .

or, more accurately, it's lack of treatment . . . during Vietnam, there were firefights on the news almost every night, and lots of photos and videos of dead and wounded Americans and Vietnamese . . .

the corporate media has sanitized this war into something resembling a video game, but with a lot less violence . . .

[tularetom]

3. I didn't have a chance to read the story but I'd bet anything

that the lack of a millitary draft has a lot to do with the relative lack of protests. As long as there's no danger of middle class college kids being conscripted into service, you won't see protests on a large scale. In fact I think most of those now protesting are old hippies, God bless 'em. If you don't have skin in the game it's hard to get too worked up about it. In my case I hated the dumbass Vietnam war as much as anybody yet I never protested it once, though I spent much of it in Berserkley. Why? I was discharged from the Army in 1963 and there was no chance of my getting nailed again.