General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: Reprise from 2011: Capitalism is dead. But how many of us is it gonna take with it? Look to OWS [View all]Leopolds Ghost
(12,875 posts)Unfortunately I don't give out where I live on DU anymore, because I'm active in my community and the lack of privacy from political harassment in the US, coupled with the fact that I'd get laughed out of my "super progressive" community for half the things I post on DU, makes it problematic. But I suppose I could send you a message.
I'm hard at work trying to get something done in my community and the less popular my political beliefs (and vaguely countercultural demeanor) become, the harder it is for me career-wise and in terms of what I'm trying to accomplish. And half the problem is my fellow "activists" many of whom are barely progressive except on boilerplate social issues. I've had arguments with someone who's pro-occupy who is now highly paid and relentlessly pro-gentrification.
So you have to look at what I call the "nihilist online activists" in the millennial generation as well, many of whom exude the same sense of disaffected entitlement that our forebears, the baby boomers did (I recently discovered an article that said baby boomers were actually more conservative than their parents, it was them who voted for Nixon and each subsequent generation has been more conservative than the WWII generation. People like my parents who were Kennedy liberals seem to have been a minority, my mother doesn't understand her neighbors. The antiwar folks were in a minority and as I know personally from my hippie friends, many antiwar hippie activists who never signed on to issues of race or sensitivity to others, became more conservative the minute they left the counterculture. They were just generally social liberals, the equivalent of the pocketbook libertarians you have in blue cities.)