Much has been written about the return to fascism under Donald Trump. But, Henry Giroux writes, not much ink has been spilled on the subject of Trump's war on children:
Finance capitalism now drives politics, governance and policy in unprecedented ways. And it’s more than willing to sacrifice the future of young people for short-term political and economic gains, if not democracy itself.
In an apparent war on children, the Trump administration provides a disturbing index of a society in the midst of a deep moral and political crisis — not the least of which was the president’s support and defence of an accused serial pedophile, Roy Moore, in his unsuccessful attempt to win an Alabama Senate seat.
Marian Wright Edelman, who heads the Children's Defence Fund, provides some very disturbing data:
As U.S. children’s rights activist Marian Wright Edelman points out, such actions are particularly alarming and cruel at a time when “millions of America’s children today are suffering from hunger, homelessness and hopelessness.”
She adds: “Nearly 13.2 million children are poor — almost one in five. About 70 per cent of them are children of colour, who will be a majority of our children by 2020. More than 1.2 million are homeless. About 14.8 million children struggle against hunger in food insecure households.”
Republicans have long railed against the injustice of saddling the next generation with mountains of debt. But they have now foreclosed on the future of young people:
Too many young people today live in an era of foreclosed hope, an era in which it is difficult either to imagine a life beyond the tenets of a savage form of casino capitalism or to transcend the fear that any attempt to do so can only result in a more dreadful nightmare.
Youth today are not only plagued by the fragility and uncertainty of the present, they are, as the late Polish philosopher Zygmunt Bauman has argued, “the first post-war generation facing the prospect of downward mobility [in which the] plight of the outcast stretches to embrace a generation as a whole.”
American youth, especially those marginalized by race and class, are subject to the dictates of the punishing state. Not only is their behaviour being criminalized in schools and on the streets, they are also subject to repressive forms of legislation.
It turns out that Big Daddy ain't no daddy at all.
Image: Cinema Fanatic
4 comments:
I was a child. If you want to make the future better make better childs.
The whole personal responsibility thing should not apply to children.
It may sound cliche but children are our future. What kind of planet to you
imagine on your death?
Exactly, Steve. If we foreclose on our children, we foreclose on our future.
What return to fascism? When was America ever fascist? How on Earth is Donald Trump a fascist? For killing free-trade globalization? Fixing the Mexican border? Stopping the military industrial complex from reviving the Cold War with Russia?
I remember back in the early days of social media commenting (over usenet) there was this hypothesis called "Godwin's Law". It stated: the longer a thread (debate) goes on, the more likely people will resort to calling others 'fascists.' That would indicate the thread is dead having descended into crap-flinging senselessness.
That would appear to describe the entire national/Western debate today.
Thread dead. Time to change the channel.
(When there is no debate, there is no democracy. Perhaps those who are trying to shut it down 'fascist' cries of wolf are the real 'fascists'.)
-Gen-X
Go back to Mussolini's defintion of fascism, Gen-X -- "the marriage of corporate and political power." That's the place to start.
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