Donald Sutherland: 'I want Hunger Games to stir up a revolution'

[Scootaloo]

48. And there are people on DU who think middle class white kids with no shirts on ended the Vietnam war

Because they've said it to themselves so often they're sure it MUST be true. Can't possibly be that the war ended - after nine years and hundreds of thousands of lives - simply because the Vietnamese won the damn thing. Naw, it was, like, Woodstock, man, yeah, the power of music showed the War Pigs the right way, and it was all groovysville from there, man.

*cough*

American protest is garbage not because of eeeeevil terrible technology... but because of the principle of garbage in, garbage out. Unfortunately the American protest culture has been, for forty years, dominated by a bunch of relics of middle-class white suburbia who, because their parents had the spare money to send them to college, had some free time to imagine they were thinking about things, and stuff, and sometimes, like, y'know. While their hears were in the right place, a good many of them left their brains behind, and they confused counterculture with protest culture.

Back then if you had no shoes, a beard, and a sign, you were "part of the movement." Nowadays if you have dreds, a nose piercing, and a drum, you're "an activist." It's really no fucking different, it's just a style variant on the same smug, self-congratulating street theater bullshit that got its started when a bunch of people with no worries started feeling guilty about not having much to worry about.

The worst thing is how these jalopies are outliving actual protestors of the era (posing is way less work than doing, less strain on the heart, you know) and as each actual activist leaves, that's ten more yutzes who are claiming to have been "just as important." Because owning a fringed buckskin jacket and liking Cher totally puts your powdered donut-butt in the middle of AIM. While annoying on its own it's also damaging, as actual methods of protest are lost, and replaced with the same Abbie Hoffman Shit-That-Doesn't-Fucking-Work.