High unemployment rates and anti-austerity measures have radicalized many around the world to fight injustices by occupying the streets. This sort of demonstration was typical on college campuses in the 1960s.
Today’s college students have little in common with their international contemporaries, or with the freedom fighters who lived on campus before them. They’re too busy updating their Facebook statuses while listening to wonky dubstep basslines and drinking stockpiled cases of outlawed Four Loko.
Perhaps they don’t want to disappoint their parents, truly lack an ideology, or they don’t understand that protests for grassroots policy change can be more fun than frat parties. This seems like a generation of “Apolitical Millenial College Students.”
Of course there are students who make us seem like real jerks for generalizing about their generation. The ones occupying Wall Street, protesting fee hikes at the University of California, fighting for animal rights at Penn, opposing the execution of Troy Davis at Howard, showing solidarity with Chilean students at Boston University, demonstrating against coal at the University of Georgia, and ending gender inequality by going topless at University of Hawaii at Manoa. Gee, I wonder which one you clicked!
