There is a lot views that I can identify with in this article. Farruggio and I are roughly of the same generation. While I didn't live in Brooklyn, I have lived in large cities in the West. Otherwise, I wonder rather bewildered by what this country has become, and feeling like a "Stranger In A Strange Land".
He seems to think our generation was superior, but I think that is naive. Comparing protests now which he sees as merely sporadic with protests during the 1960s, he writes:
In the late 60s this was not the case. As the Vietnam War limped on and on, more and more Americans took to the streets in protest. We closed my campus at Brooklyn College in May of 1970 to protest the illegal bombing of Cambodia. Hundreds of colleges nationwide did the same. There was a motivated and well run national movement to end that war and bring our troops home. Civil disobedience was prevalent throughout our great nation. For every act of violent demonstration by protestors, there were literally hundreds of instances of peaceful dissent. Guess what? The Military Industrial Empire had to finally alter its agenda and back off a bit.Also, I don't think that we protestors were mostly responsible for the Empire backing off. They were defeated by Vietnamese peasants.
The directors of the growing Empire learned a few lessons from that experience. The most important one was to have an all-volunteer army so that only those gung-ho or couldn't find a job went into their armies. Especially since the collapse of the economy in 2008, they haven't had much of a problem finding recruits.
They've also beefed up their management of media to hide their barbarous activities throughout the world and to keep people focused on trivia, and their industries have produced all kinds of electronic gadgets to keep people distracted and entertained. Then, of course, there was the 9/11 project and the terrorist bogeymen coming to get us.
It was also very clever of them to hire a person with black skin to fill the office of "President" and to handle their government's public relations. Liberals now hesitate to protest against this government because they don't want to be seen as racist. They learned this from Zionists who very successfully played that trick against people who would otherwise criticize Israeli actions.