Every time the party's left raises their little pointy heads and makes noises....this stuff happens.

[Peace Patriot]

64. I began to realize that a youth revolution was about to happen...

... when my son told me that he and his friends got all of their political information from John Stewart. And they had pretty good information, it seemed to me. This was some years ago, before Occupy and before Bernie's youth revolution. What I realize now is that my son and his friends--who are very smart, very high tech young people--COULDN'T take the 'mainstream' political garbage on TV seriously. They laughed at it. They loved John Stewart because he made fun of it, too--and so brilliantly! As for newspapers...meh. They had no interest whatsoever.

So they were INFERRING political information from what they laughed at. And none of them ended up cynical. They were laughing at how absurd it all was, how out of touch, how weird and distorted, and were forming their own views, by implication, as the opposite of absurd, out of touch, weird and distorted.

That is NOT how I became politically informed. I grew up in an era when politics was a civic duty, expressed throughout society, for instance, with serious news shows on TV deliberately separated from commercial interests, with "equal time" laws for use of our public airwaves--policies derived from the Fairness Doctrine, that also influenced print media to be FAIR--and with active, grass roots organizations within the Democratic Party that greatly influenced outcomes, and with CIVICS taught in ALL schools, with strong labor unions that also did public education, and more.

Our kids grew up in a different world, one in which all of these good civic things have been nearly destroyed--no more fairness in the media, no more need of our Democratic leaders to develop--let alone listen to--grass roots Democrats, civics no longer taught, and little or no reason for our kids to get involved, because THEIR issues, and the issues of most Americans, were simply never addressed by the powers-that-be, in the Corporate/Billionaire political show. Instead, utter idiocy has been the norm--denying climate change, for godssakes, promotion of complete numbskulls like Sarah Palin and Bush Jr., failing to hold complete criminals like Cheney and Rumsfeld to any account whatsoever, and on and on.

So the young turned to John Stewart for RELIEF, and also, I think, for some comfort that the adult world was not completely insane.

Anyway, that was my clue to what is happening now--the rebellion of the young against the insanity, and thievery, and lies, and massive crimes, of our political establishment that we have all been living with for much too long. PLUS, they have the internet now, where they can create their own news sources and, in fact, run their own campaigns!

It is a beautiful thing to behold. And thank you, John Stewart, for saving a generation of young people in the interim!