How Killer Student Debt and Unemployment Made Young People the Leaders at Occupy Wall Street

How Killer Student Debt and Unemployment Made Young People the Leaders at Occupy Wall Street: ""That we're young only means we have the most to lose by standing idle," say the young protesters mocked by mainstream media.

The sign has a clever double meaning. The young have the most to lose by standing idle and not having their voices heard in the political process, and they have the most to lose by actually being idle — or unemployed.

The media hasn’t learned the lessons from the 1960s, as there is still a tendency to dismiss young people protesting because they are young. You can see this phenomenon in the original New York Times coverage, and it appears in much of the rest. But at the heart of dismissals of young college kids in the 1960s was the idea that they had a very bright future ahead of them that they were taking for granted. For instance, here’s President Nixon in the New York Times, May 1970...."