Unemployed young people are the reason the Occupy movement just might create more significant gains than those of the 1960s. That is saying a lot, but just think about it. Recent graduates expecting to find work, can’t find work and are not likely to take that news lying down. And that’s something that wasn’t true in the 60s.
A tsunami of citizen activism, initiated by Occupy Wall Street, is poised to wash over American society. The coming battle to correct the grotesquely unequal distribution of wealth and power in this country is likely to have an even more profound impact on our society than what occurred in the 1960s.
Fifty years ago, a few white students like me were outraged to find that the sugarcoated view of America we had been taught in the 50s did not match reality. The notions of justice and human rights we had internalized motivated our actions, and as idealists, we opposed the Jim Crow laws in the South and the needless killing in Southeast Asia.
Original article posted on Truthout July 3, 2012 and written as an Op-Ed by Bill Zimmerman.
Leave a Reply