Adonis Diaries

Posts Tagged ‘Saul Alinsky


Is your spirit of resistance crushed? America youth: Fight back!
Do these practices strike a chord among the youth in America?
1. Student-Loan Debt,
2. Psychoanalyzing children, categorizing mental kinds of pathology in children, and Medicating Noncompliance,
3. Focusing on obedience and compliance in Schools,
4. “No Child Left Behind” and “Race to the Top programs,
5. Shaming Young People Who Take Education seriously,
6. Surveillance methods and technology as normal behavior,
7. Eight hours in front of Screens of television, internet, computer, cell phone…
8. The daily subjugation to Fundamentalist Religion and Fundamentalist Consumerism
I have published articles on each one of these reasons that are meant to cow youth in America from getting on the march for serious changes.
I find it interesting to abridge and re-edit an article published, in July 3,1 by Bruce E. Levine in AlterNet “Eight Reasons Young Americans Don’t Fight Back: How the US Crushed Youth Resistance”

Young Americans—even more so than older Americans—appear to have acquiesced to the idea that the “corporatocracy” can completely screw them and making them feel helpless to do anything about it.

For example, a 2010 Gallup poll asked Americans “Do you think the Social Security system will be able to pay you a benefit when you retire?”

In the group of 18- to 34-years-olds, 76 percent of them said no.

Yet despite their lack of confidence in the availability of Social Security for them, few have demanded it be shored up by more fairly payroll-taxing the wealthy: Most appear resigned to having more money deducted from their paychecks for Social Security, even though they don’t believe it will be around to benefit them.

How exactly has American society subdued young Americans?

1. Student-Loan Debt. Large debt—and the fear it creates—is a pacifying force. There was no tuition at the City University of New York when I attended one of its colleges in the 1970s, a time when tuition at many U.S. public universities was so affordable that it was easy to get a B.A.  You could earn a graduate degree without accruing any student-loan debt.

While those days are gone in the United States, public universities continue to be free in the Arab world and and most developing States.  Schooling are either free or with very low fees in many countries throughout the world.


Today in the United States, two-thirds of graduating seniors at four-year colleges have student-loan debt, including over 62 percent of public university graduates. While average undergraduate debt is close to $25,000College graduates average closer to $100,000 in student-loan debt.






Heavily tranquilizing anti-psychotic drugs (e.g. Zyprexa and Risperdal) are now the highest grossing class of medication in the United States ($16 billion in 2010).  A major reason for this, according to the Journal of the American Medical Association in 2010, is that many children receiving anti-psychotic drugs have non-psychotic diagnoses such as ODD or some other disruptive disorder (this especially true of Medicaid-covered pediatric patients).

3. Schools Educate for Compliance and Not for Democracy.








5. Shaming Young People Who Take Education Seriously. 




In the 1880s and 1890s, American farmers with little or no schooling created a Populist movement that organized America’s largest-scale working people’s cooperative, formed a People’s Party that received 8% of the vote in 1892 presidential election, designed a “sub-treasury” plan (had it been implemented would have allowed easier credit for farmers and broke the power of large banks) and sent 40,000 lecturers across America to articulate it, and evidenced all kinds of sophisticated political ideas, strategies and tactics absent today from America’s well-schooled population.

Today, Americans who lack college degrees are increasingly shamed as “losers”. For example, Gore Vidal and George Carlin, two of America’s most astute and articulate critics of the corporatocracy, never went to college, and Carlin dropped out of school in the ninth grade.

6. The Normalization of Surveillance. The fear of being under surveillance makes a population easier to control. While the National Security Agency (NSA) has received publicity for monitoring American citizen’s email and phone conversations, and while employer surveillance has become increasingly common in the United States, young Americans have become increasingly acquiescent to corporatocracy surveillance. Why?





Television is a dream come true for an authoritarian society: those with the most money own most of what people see.  First, Fear-based television programming makes people more afraid and distrustful of one another, which is good for the ruling elite who depend on a “divide and conquer” strategy. Second, TV isolates people so they are not joining together to create resistance to authorities; and regardless of the programming, TV viewers’ brainwaves slow down, transforming them closer to a hypnotic state that makes it difficult to think critically.


8. Fundamentalist Religion and Fundamentalist Consumerism.


Fundamentalist consumerism pacifies young Americans in a variety of ways. Fundamentalist consumerism destroys self-reliance: It creates the basis for people to feel completely dependent on others and who are thus more likely to turn over decision-making power to authorities.  This is the precise mind-set that the ruling elite loves to see.

A fundamentalist consumer culture legitimizes advertising, propaganda, and all kinds of manipulations, including lies.  When a society gives legitimacy to lies and manipulative tendencies, it destroys the capacity of people to trust one another and to forming democratic movements.





Note 1: In August 21, 2011, published this “education” article in The Atlantic “When Will the Bubble Burst? Student Loan Debt Swells 511 Percent”

“It’s no secret that American students are being crushed by student loans. We’re on track to cross the $1 trillion mark in total student debt, exceeding household credit card debt, sometime later this year. That sounds pretty insane, but thanks to our colleagues at The Atlantic we can see just how far out of hand the situation has spiraled.

The magazine tapped data from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and found that total student loan debt increased a whopping 511 percent between the first quarter of 1999 and the first quarter of 2011:

We all know how much havoc the housing bubble wreaked on our economy, but it turns out the growth of student loan debt was twice as steep as the growth of mortgages and revolving home equity from 1999 to the peak of the housing bubble in 2008.

One thing is for sure: if mass numbers of students start defaulting, or if they stop spending on other things because their money is going to paying off loans, a day of reckoning is surely coming. The only question is when?

Note 2:  Is the youth in America practically illiterate and are foreign to what is going outside their close surrounding?  Youth in Europe and in the Arab World are revolting, and successfully.  The latest ugly riots in England were preemptive warning to the government with the strong message: “You may balance the budget, but not at our expense”




October 2021

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