I hate the school systems hero worship of sign wielding protesters. I remember the first time few times I went to protests.
Idiot teenagers there to hang out with friends and skip school. NIMBYs there for completely different reasons than they were nominally protesting. Said NIMBYs arming teens with homemade signs which were promptly disposed of after 1 hour. Career protestors without jobs roaming from one protest to another. News crews long jaded to the reality of protests having their eyes roll out of their skulls watching said teenagers screw around. Then I watched the news regarding the same protest and it was like entering a damn reality distortion field where some narrative about the next generation of youth activists were deciding to do all this shit on their own and their NIMBY parents didn't organize the whole thing and coach their kids on what to say.
The one protest that really jaded me was being part of protests for an olympic bid and seeing absolutely nobody. Jack shit people protested. Moment the worlds media showed up to town? Oh all sorts of "activists" concerned about "the government prioritizing a party over X cause" creating a fuss when all the money was already fucking spent. "Activists" telling tourists to stay away that could help us recoup some costs because that would somehow help the poor. "Activists" vandalizing olympic related stuff daily. "Activists" getting piss drunk, overdosing on opiates, and setting up homeless camps. Then the media and school system distorted these people into everyday heroes.
>I hate the school systems hero worship of sign wielding protesters.
The part that really irks me about this is that it incentivizes "activism" in high school as a means to look good on college applications. There's a reason we don't let high-school kids vote. Likewise giving them an incentive to play the "think of the children" card on politicians is just an exercise in manipulating them. Basically nobody at age 18 has a reasonable world view because their life experience is basically limited to childhood, they only know some output of what the adults around them have fed them.
When I was learning photojournalism (as a side skill), for practice, I used to attend lots of demonstrations in Boston, and the demonstrators always seemed to be sincere.
The students (of which Boston has a ton) might have been attending different demonstrations: I mostly saw non-student adults.
Occasionally, a demonstration coordinated by a particular activism group would seem transactional: people show up and assemble, media comes out to get what might air as a few seconds of video, people leave. But even those ones, the people seemed to be sincere.
Regarding schools incentivizing "activism": that's frustrating, but not entirely new. Added to the widely-gamed college application checklist, long after "volunteering"? (I could never review college admissions applications. You can't even get mad at even the most insincere-seeming students for playing the game, since that was the game the schools put in front of them. The solution might be to not have it be a competition for scarce resources, since it no longer has to be.)
> Basically nobody at age 18 has a reasonable world view because their life experience is basically limited to childhood
It's fair to criticize teens for limited experience. It's fair to assume a some portion of what they think they know is a reflection of the common wisdom of adults in their circle. It's fair to start from the assumption that this will often result in opinions that aren't very nuanced, systematic, and balanced.
It's risky to assume this means teens have no meaningful experience, knowledge, or even expertise.
And I'm at least a little surprised to see an opinion approaching that on a forum where no small number of participants started playing/working at creating software before they reached an age expressed in double-digits.
Campus activism is a strange thing because universities are filled with young people who don't really know what they're doing, what they really care about, what they truly believe, and how they relate to society as a whole.
It's unfortunate that this is many people's first interaction with protests and activism, because it's a very unique portion of it and not at all representative of protest movements in general or of what they could be.
Idiot teenagers there to hang out with friends and skip school. NIMBYs there for completely different reasons than they were nominally protesting. Said NIMBYs arming teens with homemade signs which were promptly disposed of after 1 hour. Career protestors without jobs roaming from one protest to another. News crews long jaded to the reality of protests having their eyes roll out of their skulls watching said teenagers screw around. Then I watched the news regarding the same protest and it was like entering a damn reality distortion field where some narrative about the next generation of youth activists were deciding to do all this shit on their own and their NIMBY parents didn't organize the whole thing and coach their kids on what to say.
The one protest that really jaded me was being part of protests for an olympic bid and seeing absolutely nobody. Jack shit people protested. Moment the worlds media showed up to town? Oh all sorts of "activists" concerned about "the government prioritizing a party over X cause" creating a fuss when all the money was already fucking spent. "Activists" telling tourists to stay away that could help us recoup some costs because that would somehow help the poor. "Activists" vandalizing olympic related stuff daily. "Activists" getting piss drunk, overdosing on opiates, and setting up homeless camps. Then the media and school system distorted these people into everyday heroes.