Quit whining. Gen X, Gen Y, who gives a rat's ass. Those are labels, not facts. If you're old enough to recognize wrongs, you're old enough to act to right them.
I was high school myself when I received my first blows from police batons during a protest sit-in in front of a segregated movie house in Easton, Maryland. I was still in high school when I marched on the Pentagon to protest the war in Vietham and when I was suspended from school for refusing to remove my black armband protesting the deaths in that war. I was still in high school when I led a delegation which walked out of a convention in the Civic Auditorium in Philadelphia to protest the explusion of Cuba from the OAS. (Organization of American States, in case they teach history as badly in your school as they do in my kids'.) I was still in high school when at a convention of the American Legion I debated one-on-one against the chief legal counsel of the House UnAmerican Activities Committee (HUAC), a lawyer of vast experience and adult wisdom, who had been brought up from Washington specifically to debate me, over the inaccuracies in the film Operation Abolition. And in the minds of the majority of the Legionnaires there, I won the debate.
If you were in kindergarden I would have some sympathy. But being in high school is no excuse for not having convictions and acting on them. What have you done besides whine and whimper? Quit blaming others, and get out there and do something positive to solve the problems you claim to be so concered about.
And I don't know what you mean by your statement "We tend to go along with Ghandi." Ghandi was a hell of a fighter. He just used spiritual rather than physical weapons. The salt march was a very aggressive challenge to authority. If you are bringing him up to justify your generation being passive in the face wrong or not getting in there and challenging authority nose-to-nose, you've got him 100 percent wrong.
If you haven't read King's "Letter from Birmingham Jail," go read it. Five times at least. And read and imprint on your heart his sentence: "In any nonviolent campaign there are four basic steps: 1) Collection of the facts to determine whether injustices are alive. 2) Negotiation. 3) Self-purification and 4) Direct action."
And if you think "boomer oppression" can carry a candle to police dogs and fire hoses and batons and truncheons in back rooms of police stations and hastily dug graves in a dike outside Philadelphia, Mississippi, you don't know a damn thing about oppression.
Now quit whining and go do something positive for your world.
P.S. Since I seem to be doing all your work for you, I'll also give you the reference to King's letter online. So you have no excuse for not reading it except apathy and laziness.
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