The Bishop and the Butterfly: Murder, Politics, and the End of the Jazz Age

    DIVERGENT YOUTHFUL ENERGIES

    By Dennie Briggs on Mon, 09/12/2011 - 10:22am |

    ​Cross posted from Dennie's Blog

     

    In the Arab countries this summer, while hundreds of thousands of young people were risking their lives for a better future, 200 teenagers gathered in Boston for a one-day conference on handling etiquette for breakups on Facebook. They were advised, among other marketed uses of the technology, how to quickly update their relationship status following severed affairs, to avoid the “awkwardness” of face-to-face breakups.

     
    This astounding disparity in values and action of youths on two sides of the world, not to mention their use of technology, is all the more striking when you consider the plight of American youth:  high unemployment, poverty, the changing nature of work and the workplace, the obsolescence of schools & colleges, the towering cost of higher education—all facing youth. The reaction is largely indifference, acceptance, and—apathy.
     
    Whatever happened to the awareness, responsibility—and spirit, of American youth since their commendable actions that brought about so many social changes in the 1960s?