The Struggle Ahead for a Decent Future for our Youth

It's sometimes hard to read a Henry Giroux essay without coming away feeling like you've been dragged into a dark alley and bludgeoned.  In his latest essay, this American intellectual explores what we've allowed ourselves to become, how we've been complicit in our own orchestrated economic, social and political degradation.  Brace yourself.

"The danger is that a global, universally interrelated civilization may produce barbarians from its own midst by forcing millions of people into conditions which, despite all appearances, are the conditions of savages."

- Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951)

Following Hannah Arendt, a dark cloud of political and ethical ignorance has descended on the United States. Thoughtlessness has become something that now occupies a privileged, if not celebrated, place in the political landscape and the mainstream cultural apparatuses. A new kind of infantilism now shapes daily life as adults gleefully take on the role of unthinking children and children are taught to be adults, stripped of their innocence and subject to a range of disciplinary pressures designed to cripple their ability to be imaginative.

Under such circumstances, agency devolves into a kind of anti-intellectual cretinism evident in the babble of banality produced by Fox News, celebrity culture, schools modeled after prisons and politicians who support creationism, argue against climate change and denounce almost any form of reason. The citizen now becomes a consumer; the politician, a slave to corporate money and power; and the burgeoning army of anti-public intellectuals in the mainstream media present themselves as unapologetic enemies of anything that suggests compassion, a respect for the commons and democracy itself.

Education is no longer a public good but a private right, just as critical thinking is no longer a fundamental necessity for creating an engaged and socially responsible citizenship. Neoliberalism's disdain for the social is no longer a quote made famous by Margaret Thatcher. The public sphere is now replaced by private interests, and unbridled individualism rails against any viable notion of solidarity that might inform the vibrancy of struggle, change, and an expansion of an enlightened and democratic body politic.

...Under market fundamentalism, there is a separation of market values, behavior and practices from ethical considerations and social costs giving rise to a growing theater of cruelty and abuse throughout North America. Public spheres that once encouraged progressive ideas, enlightened social policies, democratic values, critical dialogue and exchange have been increasingly commercialized. Or, they have been replaced by corporate settings whose ultimate fidelity is to increasing profit margins and producing a vast commercial and celebrity culture "that tends to function so as to erase everything that matters." Since the 1980s, the scale of human suffering, immiseration and hardship has intensified, accompanied by a theater of cruelty in which violence, especially the daily spectacle of Black men being brutalized or killed by the police, feeds the 24-hour news cycle. The tentacles of barbarism appear to be reaching into every aspect of daily life. Domestic terrorism has come home and it increasingly targets the young.

Given these conditions, an overwhelming catalogue of evidence has come into view that indicates that nation-states organized by neoliberal priorities have implicitly declared war on their children, offering a disturbing index of societies in the midst of a deep moral and political catastrophe. Too many young people today live in an era of foreclosed hope, an era in which it is difficult either to imagine a life beyond the dictates of a market-driven society or to transcend the fear that any attempt to do so can only result in a more dreadful nightmare.

Youth today are not only plagued by the fragility and uncertainty of the present; they are "the first post war generation facing the prospect of downward mobility [in which the] plight of the outcast stretches to embrace a generation as a whole." It is little wonder that "these youngsters are called Generation Zero: A generation with Zero opportunities, Zero future" and Zero expectations. Or to use Guy Standing's term, "the precariat," which he defines as "a growing proportion of our total society" forced to "accept a life of unstable labour and unstable living."

...The war on youth emerged when the social contract, however compromised and feeble, came crashing to the ground around the time Margaret Thatcher "married" Ronald Reagan. Both were hard-line advocates of a market fundamentalism, and announced respectively that there was no such thing as society and that government was the problem, not the solution to citizens' woes. Within a short time, democracy and the political process were hijacked by corporations and the call for austerity policies became cheap copy for weakening the welfare state, public values and public goods. The results of this emerging neoliberal regime included a widening gap between the rich and the poor, a growing culture of cruelty and the dismantling of social provisions. One result has been that the promise of youth has given way to an age of market-induced angst, and a view of many young people as a threat to short-term investments, privatization, untrammeled self-interest and quick profits.

Under such circumstances, all bets are off regarding the future of democracy. Besides a growing inability to translate private troubles into social issues, what is also being lost in the current historical conjuncture is the very idea of the public good, the notion of connecting learning to social change and developing modes of civic courage infused by the principles of social justice. Under the regime of a ruthless economic Darwinism, we are witnessing the crumbling of social bonds and the triumph of individual desires over social rights, nowhere more exemplified than in the gated communities, gated intellectuals and gated values that have become symptomatic of a society that has lost all claims to democracy or for that matter any modestly progressive vision for the future.

Giroux continues with a discourse on the "soft" and "hard" war being waged by neoliberals on North American youth.

In Canada, one child in six lives in poverty, but for Aboriginal and immigrant children that figure rises to 25 percent or more, respectively. By all accounts, the rate of incarceration for Aboriginal youth - already eight times higher than for non-Aboriginal youth - will continue to skyrocket as a result of the Harper government's so-called Safe Streets and Community Act, which emulates the failed policies of the US system by, among other things, strengthening requirements to detain and sentence more youth to custody in juvenile detention centers. Surely one conclusion that can be drawn from the inquest into the tragic suicide of 19-year-old Ashley Smith, who spent five years of her life in and out of detention facilities, is that incarceration for young people can be equivalent to a death sentence.

...Politics and power are now on the side of lawlessness as is obvious in the state's endless violations of civil liberties, freedom of speech and most constitutional rights, mostly done in the name of national security. Lawlessness now wraps itself in government dictates. In Canada, it is evident in Prime Minister Stephen Harper's support for Bill C-51, an anti-terrorist bill that further limits civil rights through a pedagogy of fear and racist demonization. It is also apparent in the United Sates in such policies as the Patriot Act, the National Defense Authorization Act, the Military Commissions Act and a host of other legal illegalities. These would include the right of the president "to order the assassination of any citizen whom he considers allied with terrorists."

...Current protests among young people in the United States, Canada and elsewhere in the world make clear that demonstrations are not - indeed, cannot be - only a short-term project for reform. Young people need to enlist all generations to develop a truly global political movement that is accompanied by the reclaiming of public spaces, the progressive use of digital technologies, the development of new public spheres, the production of new modes of education and the safeguarding of places where democratic expression, new civic values, democratic public spheres, new modes of identification and collective hope can be nurtured and developed. A formative culture must be put in place pedagogically and institutionally in a variety of spheres extending from churches and public and higher education to all those cultural apparatuses engaged in the production of collective knowledge, desire, identities and democratic values.

The struggles here are myriad and urgent and point to the call for a living wage, food security, accessible education, jobs programs (especially for the young), the democratization of power, economic equality and a massive shift in funds away from the machinery of war and big banks. Any collective struggle that matters has to embrace education as the center of politics and the source of an embryonic vision of the good life outside of the imperatives of unfettered "free-market" capitalism. In addition, too many progressives and people on the left are stuck in the discourse of foreclosure and cynicism and need to develop what Stuart Hall calls a "sense of politics being educative, of politics changing the way people see things."

...The issue of who gets to define the future, share in the nation's wealth, shape the parameters of the social state, steward and protect the globe's resources and create a formative culture for producing engaged and socially responsible citizens is no longer a rhetorical issue. This challenge offers up new categories for defining how matters of representation, education, economic justice and politics are to be defined and fought over. This is a difficult task, but what we are seeing in cities such as Chicago, Athens, Quebec, Paris, Madrid and other sites of massive inequality throughout the world is the beginning of a long struggle for the institutions, values and infrastructures that make communities the center of a robust, radical democracy. I realize this sounds a bit utopian, but we have few choices if we are going to struggle for a future that does a great deal more than endlessly repeat the present. We may live in dark times, but as Slavoj Žižek rightly insists, "The only realist option is to do what appears impossible within this system. This is how the impossible becomes possible."

Canada's Age of Glum

Suddenly, Stephen Harper doesn't seem all that out of place.  The latest from pollster Nik Nanos is that many Canadians are pessimistic about the future that awaits our youth.

"...the low expectations for the future are not confined to Quebec. Everywhere in the country, except for the prairies, people told the polling company they believe the next generation is facing an economic decline.

"'I think what we are seeing is a grinding effect of a prolonged period without significant growth and it’s just wearing people down,' said Mr. Nanos, who said he did not believe a survey conducted five years ago would have obtained similar results.

There’s no real end to the economic downturn in sight, he said. 'On top of that, you’ve got record levels of personal debt, an unstable economy, and governments looking at controlling the costs of many of the services and benefits that they provide.'"

The actual numbers were just 37% of respondents who believed the next generation is hooped while 25% said they think our youth will actually be better off.  Who's right?  Until we ditch the Petro-Pols of Parliament Hill, I think the 37% are a safe bet.   So long as we have governments so beholden to a primarily foreign resource industry that they're prepared to gut environmental protections, seemingly at whim, we're living under governments that don't serve us.

For our youth, this government is malevolent.   They're the population segment most harmed by its "slash and burn" policies, by its lack of commitment to their education and health care, by its refusal to intervene to reverse the growing gap between rich and poor and the inevitable ascent of class divide and inter-generational tensions.

Today's youth will face enormous challenges, individually and collectively, as this century progresses.   While, directly, Canada will be one of just a handful of nations blessed to be the "last and least" impacted by environmental change already setting in through the most vulnerable regions of our planet, we will not be immune to the repercussions and what is coming our way will be immensely challenging.

How Canada responds to the challenges of the 21st century depends on circumstances some beyond and others within our control and there must lie our focus, the circumstances we can shape.   As perhaps never before it will be critical that we have a strong, educated, confident society.   To bear the strains we absolutely must have a cohesive society that can only be achieved, in the context of democracy, by the maintenance of a strong, robust and broad-based middle class.  Education and health care are the building blocks of that middle class but so are the narrowing of income and wealth inequality and the promotion of equality of opportunity.

It's time we proclaimed that digging sludge out of the ground is not the answer to our country's future; that our youth are the answer and that they, not bitumen, must be our priority.

European Youth Reeling

We're flooded with stories about Greece and the Euro and the European Union leaders and their deals.  Blah, blah, blah.  What these stories almost always overlook are the real victims, Europe's young people.   They are on the verge of truly becoming a "lost generation."

A report in The Guardian reveals staggering levels of youth unemployment - 28% among Italians 16-24; Spain 51%, Greece 43%.  In the Great Depression, America's unemployment rate briefly spiked at 25%.   Worse yet, some sectors of the European economy aren't expected to recover for at least a decade.

The article reports an exodus of Europe's "best and brightest" young people similar to what befell Ireland after its collapse.

As subpar Euro leaders like Britain's Cameron remain fixated on austerity campaigns that can only worsen conditions for their youth the question becomes for how long they can possibly suppress widespread unrest and what awaits their countries when that dam breaks.

Put It On the Kids' Tab - A Cautionary Tale

We got used to it after WWII, governments borrowing money to be repaid by taxpayers in the future.  In an era of foreseeable, sustained growth that wasn't so bad.   The next generation of taxpayers would be much better off and quite capable of handling the government debt they inherited.

The problem today is that our political classes are still playing the long-term debt game even though it's becoming abundantly clear that the next generation of taxpayers not only will be less well off but will also be saddled with the social burden of a rapidly aging society.   With a deal like this - not of their making, not of their choosing - what choice do they have but to revolt, to take to the streets?

Ulrich Beck, who teaches sociology at the London School of Economics and at Harvard, says it's high time for young people to get very, very angry.

...For the first time, Europe's young people are experiencing their own "European fate." Better educated than ever and possessing high expectations, they are confronting a decline in the labor markets triggered by the threat of national bankruptcies and the economic crisis. Today one in five Europeans under 25 is unemployed.
 
In those places where they have set up their tent cities and raised their voices, they are demanding social justice. In Spain and Portugal, as well as in Tunisia, Egypt and Israel, they are voicing their demands in a way as nonviolent as it is powerful. Europe and its youth are united in their rage over politicians who are willing to spend unimaginable sums of money to rescue banks, even as they gamble away the futures of their countries' youth.

The headlines have been interchangeable for some time: Insecurity Over the Future of the Global Economy, EU Bailout Fund in Jeopardy, Merkel Attends Crisis Meeting with Sarkozy, Rating Agency Announces Downgrade of US Debt. Does the global financial crisis signal the deterioration of the old center? Ironically, it is authoritarian China that is playing the moral apostle on the financial front, with its sharp criticism of both democratic America and the EU.

There is one thing the financial crisis has undoubtedly achieved: Everyone (experts and politicians included) has been catapulted into a world that no one understands anymore. As far as the political reactions are concerned, there are two extreme scenarios that can be juxtaposed. The first is a Hegelian scenario, in which, given the threats that global risk capitalism engenders, the "ruse of reason" is afforded an historic opportunity. This is the cosmopolitan imperative: cooperate or fail, succeed together or fail individually.

At the same time, the inability to control financial risks (along with climate change and migration movements) presents a Carl Schmitt scenario, a strategic power game, which opens the door to ethnic and nationalist policy.

Ulrich Beck's article is presented in the context of challenges facing the European Union and, granted, the youth uprisings he mentions have broken out on the streets of Greece, Italy and Spain and not yet in North America, but pledging the kids' credit is not (unfortunately) limited to Europe by any means.  The United States clearly leads the pack on that one even as its hopelessly corrupt government and institutions cater to the well being of the richest of the rich at the expense of the worsening fate of the wage-earning, tax paying middle classes.   American youth haven't taken to the streets en masse - not yet anyway.   Yet theirs is a candle very much burning fiercely from both ends.

Welcome, again, to the Century of Revolution.