I always read Margaret Sullivan. She was the ombudsperson at the NYT until she wasn't. Now she is at the Washington Post where she covers the media and those things that are said to resemble media.
Today she is on the response to students from Majorie Stoneham Douglas High where 17 people were shot last week. Sullivan pays special attention to the media, respectable and not, who are indulging in "right-wing sliming." She begins with twitter bee Dinesh D'Souza and goes on to anonymous tweeters who attacked individual students claiming they are provocateurs who have rushed to take advantage of this tragedy. She also notes the comment on CNN of a Republican Congressmen from Georgia, apparently an adult.
Washington Post
100 cheers for the students who have gotten through that day and the past week. Perhaps nothing will come of their efforts at protest and lobbying for gun control. Perhaps a good deal will come of it. Perhaps Trump will stop giving permission to slimers' attacks on kids who think we (and he) are the adults.
I think what they are scared of is that in a very few years this generation of kids will be old enough to vote. This may be the beginning of the proverbial "paradigm shift". My prediction is that they won't be an apathetic generation of non-voters who don't believe they can change the status quo.
ReplyDeleteWe have seen Donald Jr. (supposedly the smart son) take time out in India from cashing in on his father's government job to retweet one of the more notorious doltbolts. Which is what we could have expected.
ReplyDeleteWhile Sullivan may be concerned, I think the usually Byronic Chares P. Pierce described the Right vs the Kids on social media:
"But the real high comedy has been to watch the conservative intelligentsia embark on a serious fool’s errand—namely, trying to battle with educated teenagers on social media. I mean, don’t any of these people have kids between the ages of 10 and 20? This is like the Redcoats marching back to Boston from Lexington and Concord. They’re taking fire from behind every tree and every stonewall, and they’re getting slaughtered on platforms they’ve probably never heard of."
It makes me happy to see the kids marching and protesting. Some of their rhetoric seems overwrought, but under wrought rhetoric never got anybody anywhere.
ReplyDeleteThe sad spectacle was Trump in his golden chair looking bored "like a man sitting on the toilet," as Alec Baldwin remarked, telling kids he would arm their teachers and it would all be OK.
I honestly don't know why the man wasn't dismembered by those friends and relations of victims.
I hope they keep playing his speech to the NRA over and over and over.
The people the Republicans have to fear, even more than the non-Whites, are their children and grandchildren.
ReplyDeleteThe youth votes gave Obama the presidency. I delivered voting reminders to the young people in the most affluent and most right wing areas of our county. In the past election the youth were for Sanders, but the Democratic establishment was not. The young Sanders people whom I met were convinced that time was on their side.
There is much evidence that young people's voting and religious patterns are strongly influenced by events during their teens and twenties. Even if this movement bears no results the Republican opposition could lock the adolescents and twenties into a firm opposition to them.
Will the Democrats be bright enough to get on the right side of history when it comes to gun control and immigration? Will the American bishops be bright enough to do the same? Unfortunately the leadership of both consists of old people stuck in past patterns.
Some people apparently don't believe that high school kids could organize a protest march on their own; that they have to have outside help, people egging them on. So my question is, so what if it's true? If they have help, is that wrong? A lot of events, such as the annual March for Life, have adult sponsors. Also donors who are helping them cover expenses. Do these young people have to do it all alone to retain credibility
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