This is a query, not an attempt to incite anything. But I'd like to hear how the Kos community answers this question. Namely: Why hasn't there been more violent political protest in the last couple of years in the United States? Why, compared with the situation during the Vietnam War, or with the brief frenzy of right-wing militias during the 1990s, has this been a period of largely subdued protest, verbal and symbolic? [Updated to supply a more provocative title. Gotta compete with them alpha diarists. --DS]
I can think of several competing explanations. (1) Americans by and large feel that the collapse of the Soviet Union and allied regimes in the '90s leave the world with no viable alternative to U.S./corporate hegemony. Che Guevara has been dead for an awful long time. (2) The art of bread and circuses has been turned into a science; we're all too busy watching
American Idol and buying Powerball tickets to turn radical. (3) The failure of Bill Clinton's generation to change a damn thing has turned us all into hardened cynics. The bombers riding shotgun in the sky never turned into butterflies, so what's the use? (4) The Viet Cong never threatened us at home. Al Qaeda hit the homeland, and we still tend to think that the greatest enemy at the moment is in fact external. (5) We, personally, are not being drafted to serve in Iraq (or Iran, or...?). So it's not worth our time to raise absolute hell.
It's puzzling to me because I, at age 51, am lots angrier with the current regime and its apologists on a daily basis than I was at 17 when I was a year shy of being drafted (the draft lottery expired the year I turned 18) and when I was feeling the brunt of anti-youth and anti-longhair disdain on a daily basis. I wouldn't try to blow up a railroad bridge, as a few sadly misguided older fellow alumni of mine did at Swarthmore College a couple years before I got there in 1973. But I'm finding it more and more easier to understand how forbears of mine, in the 1770s, could have committed themselves to a less spasmodic, far more deliberative armed struggle against tyranny.
The colonists in the 1770s, after all, also had recent memory of fearsome external enemies, in the form of the French and their tribal allies. But they had come to see King George as the greater threat to their liberties and their persons. There was a point beyond which they would not be pushed.
Where is that point for us? Is it near at hand? Or infinitely delayed because the ability of corporate and political power to shape opinion has grown to the point where all stirrings toward resistance can be undermined?