On the complacency of the young.

I think what most surprises me about nowadays is how complacent the young are.

Overall, it seems like kids nowadays are so trained to love authority that they look around everywhere for a pat on the head from daddy, and don't realize how much they're getting fucked.

You think with a rainbow of faces in a college classroom that there'd be some diversity on that front, but there really isn't, as far as I can see.

Instead, it seems like most of the kids have been trained in ass-kissing and so can't snap out of that mindset enough to wake up, or perhaps they come from that section of the nation where the economy is doing quite well for them, as my one (half British) (half Sudanese) friend loves to say.

Unfortunately, as a society, it seems that the only values we have around are the "lowest common denominator" values of the dollar, so that's the only thing that kids seem to aspire to.

How refreshing it must have been in the late 60s and 70s, when the default attitude was questioning "the system"!

I'm wondering if these kids are ever going to wage intergenerational warfare and think contemptuously of their parents and their values.

You can always hope...

The other day at the art school as I was setting up for class I heard the students talking among themselves, and one was saying how she had a medication reaction and her RA had to call the ambulance, and now she has a $1000 bill for that and $5000 for the ER b/c the school's insurance doesn't cover it.

"What does all this money go for?", one student asked. "You think with what we'd pay, we'd be covered."

Then they began batting around how fucked up the system was with money being taken out of their pockets for education, something I never hear at the other university I work for.

That said, I still get the sense that the art school kids aren't in the "overthrow the system" mindset, but rather are kind of mildly bewildered that the system isn't working out for them.