The Will to Resist

Russell Means speaks about the encroachment of government into community and how people have lost the will to educate and self-organize. In so doing, we have lost the ability to resist and continue resisting. Russell Means points toward how to solve these problems in this edition of Weekend Update.
http://www.republicoflakotah.com/2009/weekend-update-22-the-will-to-resist/

Weekend Update #22: The Will to Resist from Russell Means on Vimeo.

From Radley Balko's The Agitator - Gene Healy fears the statism of the generation now coming of age politically:

In May, the Center for American Progress released a lengthy survey of polling data on Millennials, concluding that they’re a “Progressive Generation,” eager to increase federal power.

CAP is the leading Democratic think tank, so it has a vested interest in that conclusion. But they’re on to something. In the last election, 18-to-29 year-olds went for Barack Obama by a 34-point margin.

The CAP report shows that Gen Y is substantially more likely to support universal health care, labor unions, and education spending than older voters. And other surveys support CAP’s “Progressive Generation” thesis.

In 2008, the nonpartisan National Election Study asked Americans whether “the free market” or “a strong government” would better handle “today’s complex economic problems.” By a margin of 78 to 22 percent, Millennials opted for “strong government.”

Kids today are a credulous bunch. The 2007 Pew Political Values survey revealed “a generation gap in cynicism.” Where 62 percent of Americans overall view the federal government as wasteful and inefficient, just 42 percent of young people agree.

If there’s an upside to this it’s that the first generation that can’t remember a time before the Internet does seem to at least to care about civil liberties. They tend to be anti-war, anti-drug war, cognizant of and alarmed by police misconduct, and while they put too much trust in government, they do seem to be be genuinely motivated to force government transparency and accountability, two inherent Internet values. And frankly, if that motivation doesn’t fade, what they discover–either through government disclosures or through its refusal to disclose–ought to be enough to shake at least a few of them from their broader faith in the state.