Left Behind? American Youth and the Global Fight for Democracy

Left Behind? American Youth and the Global Fight for Democracy
Out of place and subject to a grating diversity of realities that reveal massive unemployment, underpaid temporary work, skyrocketing tuition, escalating rent, rising food costs, deepening poverty and the indignity of having to live with their parents, youth no longer symbolize one of the most crucial investments enabling a society to build on its dreams. On the contrary, placed at the limits of the social, youth have become, as Jean and John Comaroff point out, "the creatures of our nightmares, of our social impossibilities and our existential angst."(11) Moreover, any expression of dissent invites state sanctioned rage, violence, torture and imprisonment. Both banned and abandoned by society, too many young people around the globe now live in what Zygmunt Bauman calls "a state of perpetual emergency."(12)