Headline March 12, 2018/ ''' WRECKAGE -STUDENTS- WRANGLES '''

''' WRECKAGE -STUDENTS- 

WRANGLES '''

*THE FORCE OF DECENCY AWAKENS* : !WOW! and Something big is happening, and bed men in power, should be very, very afraid.

A very funny thing is happening on the American scene : A powerful upwelling of decency.

Suddenly, it seems as if the worst lack of all conviction, while the best are all filled with a passionate intensity. No one really knows whether this will translate into political change.

But America may just very well be in the midst of a *transformative moment*.

You can see the abrupt turn toward decency in the rise of hashtag MeToo movement' in a matter of months ground that had seemed immovable shifted, and powerful sexual predators started facing career-ending consequences.

*You can see it in the Parkland school massacre*.

For now, at least the usual reaction to mass killings - a day or two of headlines, then sort of a collective shrug by the political class and a return to its normal obeisance to the gun lobby - isn't really playing out.

Instead, the story is staying at the top of the news, and associating with the N.R.A. is starting to look like the political and business poison it should have been all along.

And one could argue that you can see it at the ballot box, where hard-right politicians in usually reliable Republican districts keep being defeated thanks to surging activism by ordinary citizens.

This isn't what anyone, certainly not the political commentariat expected.

After the 2016 election in America, many in the news media seemed all too ready to assume that  Trumpism represented the real America, even though Hillary Clinton had won the popular vote and-

Russian intervention the Comey letter aside - would surely have won the electoral vote, too, but for the Big Sneer, the derisive tone adopted by countless reporters and pundits.

There have been hundreds if not thousands of stories about grizzled Trump supporters sitting in diners, purportedly showing the out-of-touchness of our cultural elite.

And for all of the above pure insights, The World Students Society thanks author, Paul Krugman.

AND They looked at me like I was from Mars.

''That's the way powerful white males talk about America.'' one student said. When I asked how they were taught American history, a few said they weren't taught much of it.

''In my high school education the American Revolution was a rounding error,'' one young man said. Others made it clear that the American story of oppression and guilt.

''You come to realize the U.S. is this incredibly imperfect place.''

''I don't have a sense of being proud to be an American.'' Others don't recognize an American identity at all : ''The U.S. doesn't have a unified culture the way other places do,'' one said.

I asked them to name the defining challenge of their generation,

Several mentioned the decline of the nation-state and the threats to democracy.

A few mentioned inequality, climate change and a spiritual crises of meaning.

'' America is undergoing a renegotiation of the terms and of who is powerful,'' a woman from the  University of Chicago astutely observed.

I asked the students what change agents they had faith in.

They almost always mentioned somebody local, decentralized and on the ground - teachers, community organizers.

A woman from Stockton, Calif., said she she was hoping to return there.

A woman from Morocco celebrated the activists who operate from a position of no fear. They are just fighting for the basics - education, health care and food.

''We want change agents that look us. We want to see ourselves moving the country forward,'' one Chicago woman told me.

*The students spent a lot of time debating how you organize an effective movement*.

One pointed out that today's successful movements, like Black Lives Matter and MeToo, don't have famous figureheads or centralized structures.

Some students embraced these dispersed, ground-up and spontaneous organizations. If they flame out after a few months, so what? They did their job.

*Others thought that, no, social movements have to grow institutional structures if they are growing to last, and they have to get into politics if they are going to produce any serious change*.

A woman from the  Middle East at Yale's Jackson Institute noted that the Muslim Brotherhood spent decades debating whether to remain outside the system as a community organization or to get into politics if they were going to produce any serious change.

That was the sort of debate I saw playing out in front of me on campus after campus.

I came away from these conversations thinking that one big challenge for this generation to determine how to take the good things that are happening on the local level and-

Translate them into the national level, where the problems are.

I was also struck by pervasive but subtle hunger for a change in the emotional tenor of life.

*''We're more connected but we're more apart.''* one student lamented.

Again and again, students expressed hunger for social and emotional bonding, for a shift from guilt and accusation towards empathy.

''How do you create relationship?'' one student asked.

*That maybe the longing that undergirds all others*.

Welcome to !WOW! - The World Students Society for every conceivable subject in the world, from a generation the world over, a generation merging from the wreckage. 

With respectful dedication to the Leaders, Parents, Students, Professors and Teachers of America and then the world.

See Ya all on !WOW! - the World Students Society and....................  Twitter-!E-WOW! - the Ecosystem 2011:

''' Global Addiction '''

Good Night and God Bless

SAM Daily Times - the Voice of the Voiceless