Don’t Look Now But It’s International Students’ Day

Note to all of my younger readers—as if I had any.  Today is International Student’s Day but even if it didn’t fall on Sunday this year, you would not notice it at any American school, college, university.  Why? Because the day honors students not just for academics, but for their traditional role as being a kind of collective public conscience, the bearers of high ideals, and a thorn in the side of arbitrary authority everywhere.   In other words pretty much exactly what our oligarchs and authorities do not want.  They would prefer you train quietly and diligently to seamlessly become cogs in the machinery of their prosperity.  Or if you must blow off steam, do it at football games, keggers, or meaningless hook-up sex.  Anything but protest.

The day owes its origins to the dark days following the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia in 1939.  The country was perhaps the most sophisticated in eastern Europe with a large and prosperous middle class which placed value on what was called high culture.  Education was particularly valued and it had one of the highest percentage of its young people enrolled in colleges and universities in the world.  In Prague many of those students had watched glumly as German troops poured into the city in March.

Some students fled the country with their families, it they were able.  Jewish students were expelled and Jewish professors fired.  Some students, particularly young Communists and left Social Democrats went underground and began to form what would become a resistance movement.  Most stayed fearfully at their studies, but many were determined to protest the subjugation of their country.

On October 29, the anniversary of the declaration of the Czechoslovak Republic in 1919, students of the Medical Faculty of Charles University held a street rally which was violently suppressed by the Nazis.   Among the wounded was Jan Opleta who was shot and died of his wounds on November 11.

Students from all over Prague and the now splintered Czechoslovakia turned out by the tens of thousands to turn Opleta’s funeral procession into a mass protest on November 15.  Students expected reprisals.  What they got was beyond any of their imaginations.

On November 17 the Nazis stormed the University of Prague and other campuses.  All universities around the former nation were immediately closed and their students ejected.  1,200 were rounded up and deported immediately to concentration camps.  Others would be picked up and arrested over the next year.  Few of those sent to the camps survived the War.

Nine professors and students were shot without trial the same day.  Their names have become a litany of heroes to Czechs—Josef Matoušek, Jaroslav Klíma, Jan Weinert, Josef Adamec,    Jan Černý, Marek Frauwirt, Bedřich Koukala, Václav Šafránek, and František Skorkovský.

In 1941 the International Student Council (ISC) which included many refugee, proclaimed November 17 International Students day with the approval and encouragement of Allied governments which used the proclamation in their propaganda broadcasts to the Continent.

The celebration was kept alive in the post war years by the successor organization to the ISC the International Union of Students.  Along with the National Unions of Students in Europe and others there has been an on-going attempt to get the United Nations to officially recognize the day along with celebrations for Women, Children, Indigenous Peoples, and such.  The effort has been met with what might be called benign neglect.  It turns out a lot of governments are worried about politicized students.  And support has been forthcoming and withdrawn depending on whose ox is being gored by students in the street.

Take the case of the old Soviet Union and its Eastern Bloc allies.  They originally embraced the celebration as an extension of anti-fascism.  But that changed after another incident in Prague’

In 1989 independent student leaders and the official organized mass demonstration for the 50th anniversary of the attack on Czech schools and students.  The 15,000 students who took to the street in a peaceful parade used the opportunity to criticize the Communist Party and government on an array of issues.  Police responded with a predictable baton attack leaving many wounded and one dead.  The dead man turned out to be a secret police agent who had infiltrated the students but had gotten too close to his own government’s clubs. 

Students did not realize the dead man was an agent, however, and rumors of the death of a comrade swept the capital.  A student strike was proclaimed and supported by actors and others.  The subsequent uproar led directly to the Velvet Revolution and the ouster of the Communist Government breaking the hold of the Soviet Union on Eastern Europe.

 After the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union, European student groups fractured on ideological lines.  In the chaos, international coordination of Student Day observances fell by the way side, although many countries and national Student Union carried on independent celebrations.

Since then students have been at the forefront of protest and rebellion throughout the former Soviet empire, in China’s Tiananmen Square, in the Arab Spring, in anti-austerity protests across Europe, in Istanbul, and dozens of other places around the world.  They protest against tyrants of the Left and of the right, against oligarchic wealth, and religious zealotry.   No wonder governments are so skittish about encouraging them with United Nations recognition.

At the World Social Forum held in Mumbai, India in 2004 various student groups and national unions began to discuss re-launch an official, coordinated movement.  The movement has picked up steam, particularly in Europe.

In 2009 there was a massive commemoration of the 70th Anniversary and a major conference held at the University of Brussels.  Among the actions taken was a resolution pressing for the adoption of a European Student Rights Charter.

But still nothing going on in the USA.  Hey, here’s an idea, young readers.  What say you start something next year….

Turkish Rebellion Evokes Memories of Beijing in ‘89

Massive street protests have become common over the past few years from the various color coded rebellions that led to the down fall of remnant Communist regimes in Eastern Europe and the former USSR, the Arab Spring that led to the downfall of the Egyptian government and threatened conservative regimes, austerity protests across Europe, a mass student rebellion in Canada, and on a lesser scale the big marches and encampments of the Occupy Movement in this country.

Except were the rebellions seem somehow to service American foreign policy interests, the U.S. press shows us almost nothing of this.  Yet those of us who are interested in the world have found ways to watch the power of people taking control of their own lives via the blog-o-sphere and social media.  The images are powerful, but after a while tend to blend together.  We become almost blasé about yet another million or so people taking to the streets.

The recent events in Turkey, a westernized Islamic country about which American know little, however, have galvanized our attention.  What started out as a modest protest against taking Taksim Square, the last green space in the center of Istanbul, for redevelopment as an upscale shopping mall.  But massive attacks on the demonstrators using what looks like the most intense and sustained use of tear gas ever unleashed accompanied by a new wrinkle—tear gas mixed in the spray of powerful water cannons—and traditional charges by mounted police and cops with truncheons,  quickly inspired a popular insurrection.

In four days it has spread from Istanbul to the capital of Ankara and to at least 27 major cities in all corners of Turkey.  It began with secularized, urban middle class and students but has quickly grown to include the labor movement which today announced plans for a general strike, and even to the government’s base of moderate Islamists.  Unlike other movements in the region, more radical Islamic elements seem isolated and unsure what to do.

Violence has escalated.  Thousands upon thousands have been injured by gas, gas projectiles, beatings, and trampling.  The government acknowledges the arrests of more than 1,700, a figure that is probably ridiculously low.  Much of the street fighting goes on at night out of the vision of western media.  Use of lethal live fire and heavy armor has not been confirmed.  But stunning photo shows a literal river of blood washing down an Istanbul street, stark evidence that atrocities have been committed.  Yet the rebellion only grows.

Photos and videos have provided images of the uprising that stun an move us—an attractive, defiant young woman in a fashionable red dress, Italian shoes and shoulder bag standing alone just feet in front of police taking as stream of gas directly in the face,  a section of street littered from gutter to gutter with thousands of spent gas canisters —most made in the U.S.A.,  the fog of gas boiling nearly to roof lines,  young men emerging from the cloud, a Whirling Dervish in black and a gas mask dancing defiance.

All bring back memories of other iconic images from China twenty-four years ago. 

On June 4, 1989 the tanks and troops of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) swept thousands of demonstrators from Beijing’s Tiananmen Square and adjacent streets.  It was a bloody end to nearly two months of escalating protests against the leadership of the Communist Party of China and corruption of government officials. 

It began during the most liberal period country had witnessed since the establishment of the People’s Republic of China in 1948. In 1976 earlier Tiananmen Square protests of disrespect shown by hard line leaders to the death of popular Premier Zhou Enlai had set off events which would lead to the ouster of the so-called Gang of Four following the death of Chairman Mao Zedong.  That finally ended the last vestiges of the reign of terror known as the Cultural Revolution which had taken many lives, sent hundreds of thousands to exile or re-education camps and virtually destroyed the economy. 

The Gang of Four’s leading opponent, Deng Xiaoping was acting premier at the time of the protests and was exiled for supposedly sponsoring the rebellion.  With the Gang in prison and their allies deposed, the Politburo recalled him to Beijing.  Two years latter he had consolidated power to become China’s de-facto supreme leader while publicly holding secondary offices. 

Deng completed the purge of Cultural Revolution figures in the Party and gained public support by hailing the Tiananmen demonstrators as heroes.  He loosened state control of the media and allowed a relatively free press to operate for the first time ever.  Free speech flourished on campus and in villages, which rewarded Deng with their loyalty.  Most significantly he instituted broad free market reforms that jumpstarted the moribund economy. 

Yet he had failed to match his economic reforms with political ones.  The Communist Party remained rigidly in control of all levels of government and the economic boom was accompanied by widespread corruption among officials. 

Even many senior party members, including Party Chairman Hu Yaobang, supported broadening political reforms.  So even as agitation for change picked up speed, there was an aura of hope.  It came as a shock when Chairman Hu was purged in January 1987 and forced to make a humiliating public self-criticism by old guard Politburo members who feared reforms had strayed too far from Maoist orthodoxy and threatened China’s one party system. 

Democracy advocates were taken aback by the development but encouraged that other allies remained in senior positions.  But when Hu died suddenly of a reported heart attack in April, activists were outraged that the Party refused to give him an adequate memorial in the city’s ceremonial heart, Tiananmen Square on which sits the Great Hall of the People with its enormous portrait of Mao.  Nearby is the Zhongnanhai, the walled in compound which is the seat of both the Party and Government.

 On April 15 relatively small groups of people began to hold mourning gatherings for Hu at the Monument to the People’s Hero in massive Tiananmen Square while students at local Universities began to hold campus meetings. On the afternoon of April 17 the first of several marches of university students to mourning gatherings outside of the Great Hall of the People began.  By late evening a few thousand people were on the square either at the Monument or in the crowd in front of the Great Hall.  Police arrived and tried to convince the crowds to leave but did not use force.

Sometime that night discussions among the student demonstrators resulted in a List of Seven Demands that they wanted the Party and government to address.  The tone was respectful, and the demands quite moderate requests for reform.   On the morning of the 18th one group marched on the Zhongnanhai complex to present their demands.  They were blocked by police and began a sit-in at the gates.  Over the next two day some officials did emerge to engage in unofficial discussion with the students and to plead with them to go home. 

On the 20th baton wielding police dispersed the demonstrators from in front of the government complex.  All of this was being freely reported by the as yet uncensored Chinese media.  Word of the clashes only swelled crowds on the Square.  The eve of Hu’s funeral the next day drew more than 100,000 to the square before authorities blocked access. 

Student protestors, with the support of their faculties, announced strikes as the numerous colleges and universities in the capital, and strikes spread to other major cities as well.  By this time senior leadership of the Party was getting alarmed, but was still split between sympathetic reformers and an emerging block of hard-line senior leaders. 

The student movement itself was far from unified and still included many Party members and sympathizers seeking incremental reform within the system and growing numbers calling for a deeper Democratic reform and even the abolition of the supreme power of the Party.  

Yet demonstrators routinely sang approved patriotic songs, the International, and venerating the memory of Mao.  Three young men who defaced the giant Mao poster on the square, in fact, were subdued by demonstrators and voluntarily turned over to the police. 

The movement was also beginning to attract support from the city’s workers who were less concerned with democratic reforms than with tempering the hard edges of the market reforms which were causing rising unemployment and escalating prices. 

Despite displays of loyalty the nation’s top paper, the People’s Daily assailed the movement in a front page editorial on April 24th signaling a hardening of official attitudes.  On May 4th, the 50th anniversary of anti-western, nationalist student demonstrations that led to the downfall of the Imperial system, 100,000 marched in Beijing demanding formal talks with the government on reform.  The government refused to negotiate with anyone but representatives of discredited party led approved student unions.   

Huge rallies of students began on the Square on May 13th and hundreds of students began hunger strikes until official negotiations began.  Reformist Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev arrived in the city on a state visit midmonth bringing with him hoards of international press, who stepped up their coverage of the unfolding demonstrations.

On the 18th Premier Li Peng had a public dialogue with a handful of student leaders which was broadcast.  Civility quickly broke down when the students accused the government of dragging its feet on reform and Li personally of being insincere in his discussions.

The Party was still divided. For his part Li stressed the need to retain order.  Early morning on the 19th Party General Secretary Zhao Ziyang, a reformer believed to be in sympathy with the students, came on the square and addressed the demonstrators with a bull horn.  Many believed he had promised real negotiations. 

But a shadow cabal of senior leaders including Deng Xiaoping and Premier Li Peng had enough and took control of Party and state apparatus, issuing Martial Law on May 20. The People’s Liberation Army was ordered to the Square, but was peacefully turned back by demonstrators. 

Party elders realized that local units in Beijing, including senior officers, were sympathetic to the strikers and unwilling to move against them with force.  The order was publicly rescinded on the 24th but the hardliners were only regrouping.  They declared a May 30th deadline to end the demonstrations before the hunger strikes could result in any deaths and generate public sympathy.

In the wake of the embarrassing national TV spectacle, press censorship was reemployed as demonstrations spread throughout the country.  Zhao and other moderates were purged.  Meanwhile they scoured the nation for military units loyal enough to move against the demonstrators. 

On May 30th students unveiled a giant Goddess of Democracy holding a Torch of Freedom.  The Statue, with its more than passing resemblance to the Statue of Liberty was the final straw.  That night troops and tanks from PLA units in the provinces arrived on the scene.  They were ordered to clear the demonstrators on June 1. 

As word spread Beijing residents, most of them not students flooded into the streets to block the troops.  Barricades were set up and street fighting, including the use of Molotov cocktails erupted around the city.  Some PLA army crews were reported dragged from armored personnel carriers, beaten, and killed.  Advance units finally reached the Square early the next morning but had orders to hold fire and offer the demonstrators there a chance to withdraw.  Debate raged on the square about whether to stay or go.  Students were given a deadline of 6 AM on the 3rd. 

Meanwhile fighting continued on adjacent streets.  Sometime that morning units began “rolling up the streets” firing directly into crowds and crushing bicyclists and pedestrians ahead of them.  A BBC reporter observed troops firing directly into the Square, others reported seeing gun flashes and hearing fire from that direction.  But there were no international film crews or photographers on the Square itself. 

Students took refuge in or behind rows of busses, but were pulled out and beaten or shot.  Some students were assaulted and shot as they tried to leave the square.  Meanwhile a last group held out near the Hall of the People.  Accounts vary as to their fate.  Reports of Spanish news film crewof about 5000 people being escorted peacefully out of the square have never been verified by any footage. 

The Chinese government itself claims that the Square was taken peacefully, although it acknowledged casualties on the surrounding streets. 

CBS newsman Richard Roth reported being driven across the square shortly after dawn in a PLA vehicle and seeing no bodies, no ambulances, no blood or any evidence a battle had occurred on the square.  Others maintain that there was a final battle but that clean-up crews rapidly descended on the Square. 

Final estimates of casualties in the whole operation vary greatly. The Chinese government claim of 241 dead, including soldiers and 7,000 wounded is clearly nonsense.  Soviet intelligence reported 10,000 dead, both civilian and military.  Although some soldiers were killed by mobs or burnt up in their vehicles, most were killed and wounded in their own wild cross fire.

Chinese Red Cross reported officially that 2,600 died before their report was censored.  Later a Red Cross official privately said that the number was closer to 5,000 dead and 30,000 injured.  Hospitals were overflowing before authorities closed them to demonstrators.  Many avoided them after reports of patients being taken away.  There were undoubtedly many avoidable deaths due to untreated injuries over the next weeks. 

Reports also are in conflict about how many people were subsequently detained and how many might have been executed. 

The most iconic image of the Tiananmen events actually occurred on June 5 as a column of tanks was trying to leave the Square.  Western television cameras caught one young man in a white shirt blocking the column by standing directly in front of it.   He defied the tank, even climbing on board to talk to the crew, before he was finally led away.  He was never positively identified and rumors swirl as to his fate—did he escape into a life of hiding, or, more likely, was he arrested and executed? 

In subsequent years China has become the most vigorous economy in the world and an acknowledged super power.  It has polished its international reputation with the Olympics and a  World’s Fair.  But the government and Party remain in rigid control and brook no public dissent.

This week Chinese officials announced that Jiang Yaqun, now 73 years old and suffering from Alzheimer’s Disease, was finally released after 24 years in prison.  He was reputedly the last surviving  detainee of the uprising.

 

Let’s Make Class War More than the Buzz Word of the Moment

Class War, it’s nothing new.  In fact part of the power of the phrase comes because it conjures up images of bloody revolution.  Depending on which side you are on, you envision the Paris Mob dragging their betters to the guillotine and grim Bolshevik hoards or American militia attacking a camp of sleeping striking miners with machine guns.  My old outfit, the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), a product of those times, put it unflinchingly in their famous Preamble, “The working class and the employing class have nothing in common…”

But we haven’t heard much about Class War in America for the last several decades until fairly recently.  That’s because the Depression era reforms of the New Deal effectively called a truce.  American workers were granted certain protections—child labor laws, the 40 hour work week, the right to unionize, unemployment insurance, Social Security—in exchange for refraining from trying to carry the heads of Henry Ford, John D. Rockefeller, and assorted other malefactors of great wealth around the streets on pikes.

The bargain seemed to work out well for just about everyone concerned.  The reforms, combined with the industrial explosion fueled by World War II production, post-war technological innovation, and the unchallenged dominance of the American economy in the world lifted millions out of what Jack London had called The Abyss into the comfortable middle class.  The bosses made out pretty well, too.  Not only did they find an enormous new markets for their consumer goods and millions of new investors—via pension plans and individual enthusiasm—in their companies, but they could sleep soundly at night without a pistol under the pillow.

In the last decade or so the phrase has been making a comeback, however.  Not on the lips of the working class, mind you, but in the fevered visions of a resurgent right wing.  You started to hear it in Congress every time a Democrat stood up to propose a new program for the poor, or more recently, whenever one would challenge the latest attempts to repeal the New Deal.  Every time any hapless mope would suggest not dropping trousers on command for a good fucking by the rich, wails of “Class War! Class War!” would erupt.  

When the faux populists of the Tea Party, obediently carrying out the orders of the ultra-rich ideologues that funded them, arrived in Congress not only did they capture the Republican Party, but they ratchet up talk of Class War.

And not only in Congress.  A wave of Tea Party governors and state legislatures unencumbered with effective Democratic opposition, enacted wave upon wave of draconian assaults on working people in the name of  budgetary responsibility and “getting government off our backs.”  When the people of Wisconsin rose up en-mass for a sustained series of demonstrations, occupation of the state capital, and recall elections, panic on the right rose to new levels.  Class War! Class War! Class!

This weekend things came to a head on multiple fronts.  

It became apparent that President Barack Obama’s Jobs Bill, unveiled just two weeks ago, was going to be rejected out of hand by Republicans in Congress.  But instead of backing down and “recalculating” by offering yet more concessions, his repeated practice in the past, the President and Congressional Democrats stayed firm.  Much of it, of course, was just good politics.  Since they could not win passage of the plan they could take advantage of the situation to paint the Republicans for the heartless bastards they are and perhaps steal back the initiative in the coming election.  To emphasize his determination, the President stepped up to a microphone and demanded that Congress pass the package now as sent to them.  On Monday he even doubled down with a threat veto any Debt Reduction Panel (a.k.a. Super Congress) came up with that did not contain tax increases for the rich. 

The howls and chants of Class War reached a crescendo as Republican after Republican took the Sunday morning TV talk fests to scream it as loud as they could—Class War!  Class War! Class War!

The president said, “It’s not Class War, it’s math.”  Clever line, but wrong.  There is a Class War.  It is being wage ruthlessly and effectively—by the wealthy and the new class of their ideological political servants.

Just how far this vision of Class War has come from political maneuvering and posturing was pointed up in a speech to acolytes this weekend by right wing Blogger and hero Andrew Breitbard with the bloody scalp of Rep. Andrew Weiner dangling from his belt.  He called for real war—with guns blazing—on Liberals, the enemy in the Class War.  And he made it abundantly clear that he was not speaking metaphorically or in jest.  He meant every word of it, to wit:

I always think to myself, ‘Fire the first shot.’ Bring it on. Because I know who’s on our side. They can only win a rhetorical and propaganda war. They cannot win. We outnumber them in this country, and we have the guns. [audience laughter] I’m not kidding. They talk a mean game, but they will not cross that line because they know what they’re dealing with. And I have people who come up to me in the military, major named people in the military, who grab me and they go, ‘Thank you for what you’re doing, we’ve got your back.’

Now this kind of rhetoric has not been uncommon on the fringe of the fringe, those web sites where Tea Party crazies fade seamlessly into neo-Nazis, neo-Confederates, skin heads, Klansmen, and militia types.  Michelle Bachmann has made hints in this direction by referring to possible “Second Amendment options” if electoral politics are not sufficient to create a revolution.  But this is the first time a big name on the right, one who is taken with deadly seriousness by the national media, has come out in advocacy of such violence. 

Of course, he is just living out the rich fantasy lives of many of his followers who cast themselves as the heroes of epic movies in their heads, dealing death and vengeance with righteousness.  These folks sometimes do not take a lot of prodding, or wink-and-nod approval to cross the line from fantasy to the headlines of the next “crazed lone gunman” story.

In the face off all of this rising spleen, working people, whose lives and incomes have come under tireless assault, have been strangely, until Wisconsin, silent.

The United States is not alone in the world facing economic crisis and austerity moves by governments.  In Europe from Greece to Portugal to Italy to Spain to Ireland even to Britain millions have taken to the street.  They have been influenced by earlier successful “peoples movements” which led to the down fall one after the other of the old Communist regimes of Eastern Europe and by the Arab Spring of this year.

But, aside from the minor skirmishes in Wisconsin and a few other states, where, people wondered, were the American People?

This weekend, maybe the first signs of stirrings began in New York City.  This Saturday Occupy Wall Street protests began.  Inspired by the use of social media in the Arab Spring movement that brought mass people power to the streets of Cairo and across North Africa and the Middle East, Facebook and Twitter were used to make calls for an ongoing demonstration go viral.  Encouraged by the response, organizer confidently predicted that up to 20,000 protestors might show up with tents and sleeping bags to confront the seat of American economic power.

On Saturday, far fewer actually showed up.  Crowd estimates varied from a low ball 500 to wildly inflated claims on some left websites of more than ten times that number.  My guess, from the distant vantage point of Illinois and reviewing available info is that the real numbers hovered around 1000 for all or part of that day.

The low turnout was an excuse for the national media to largely ignore the story entirely or dismiss it with the barest mention.  Many on the left were no less kind, charging that the whole experiment with people power was a failure.

But those who did show up did not leave.  The set up camp in a donated private park near Wall Street, and although largely blocked by police from access to the Street itself have kept up protests, now in day 4.  Their ranks also seem to be growing, at least for specific announced demonstrations if not for the whole camp out.

There have been minor confrontations with police and a scattering of arrests, but the protestors are both resolute and committed to non-violence.  The national media have finally been forced to notice.

The make-up of the protestors is interesting.  Conspicuously absent are the usual line-up of old and new left sects with their boiler plate rhetoric and rigid ideological visions of the “correct line.”  Nor are the masked anarchist street fighters, who have become an expected presence at international economic summits and other such gatherings, been much of a presence, although a couple of red and black flags have appeared.  That’s probably because of the insistence on a non-violent mass presence.  Many of those involved seem to have few deep roots in the traditional left at all.

They are resolutely democratic with a small “d.”  The hallmark of the movement is the sometimes seemingly endless General Assemblies where the protestors hash out both detailed demands, and daily tactics in the open.  All are guaranteed a right to speak and be heard.  Decisions are apparently made on the basis of modified consensus—votes are taken, but not action is taken without well over just-barely a majority.  While tedious to watch on streaming video available on the web, it is completely transparent and remarkably effective at quickly adapting to shifting conditions on the ground.

Some observers have noted that although there is a presence of veteran activists and some movement old timers—read graying ‘60’s era radical like myself—the vast majority of the demonstrators are young people in their 20’s.  The “missing generation” in so much protest over the last decade or so, seems finally to have shown up.  It’s largely because the social media circles that brewed the whole scheme are their natural environment.  Part of it is because they have time—lots of it.

These are the children of the failure to launch generation.  Many were obedient to the warnings of their elders and were compulsively high achievers in high school and college.  They studied hard, harder than they partied.  The trained for high paying careers.  A few years ago their futures looked endlessly bright.  But in the Great Depression: The Sequel  they graduated into a world with few jobs, fierce completion for the few that were available and lower compensation for the lucky winners of the job lotto.  Many have had to take menial work, mostly at entry level jobs in the service industry that once went to high school graduates or even dropouts.  Others have found no work at all.  Many are still in their childhood bedrooms, in makeshift rooms in their parents’ homes, tripled up in tiny apartments or even surviving by couch surfing.  As in Europe, these youth, deprived of hope, are the main engine of this protest.

While the final emergence of this generation is encouraging, the absence of older workers, who have taken such a beating for so long that they may have become demoralized, is a worry.  So is the almost total absence of Black, Hispanic, and other minority faces.  To really thrive this movement has to include these folks, too.

But as for me, I am glad for signs that our side of the Class War—here to fore the losing side—is beginning to fight back. 

Count me as one geezer ready to re-enlist.  Who’s with me?