COLLEGE - November 18, 2010

In this week’s news, we see the fallout from the program of the Tories in UK to increase the tuition charges in their universities. The students have been protesting all over the kingdom. For many this will inevitably mean their being unable to afford college so long as the Conservatives, supported by the Liberals, remain in power. That could easily last as long as 5 years or even more and for many of the youngsters that will result in a new lost generation, considering how hard it is to pick up the academic mantle after pursuing the exigencies of adult life for a stretch of years. For some of the students, this denial of the chance for a middle-class life is a destruction of the dreams toward which they have worked all their young lives and they are very angry. Some have yielded to that anger to the point where their decorous UK training gives way before the enormity of that vile denial, and they express their rage in breaking things of value to the proprietor class. In response, the representatives of that class, notably those such as the Prime Minister and the Mayor of London, who have been raised in the entitled surroundings of Britain’s rich, want to know why they have to break things. They want the demonstrators to carry out their protest in a decorous way where, just incidentally, the rich can safely pay no heed to it, without suffering any loss of any kind. Here in US, Obama announces that there is nothing the jobless can do about it but sit quietly in the corner waiting for the current Depression to cure itself and go away, with the fallout so far being only that so many of the working class make their protest by failing to go to the polls to vote for the Democrats, despite the fact that the GOP are even worse. When things get bad for longer, as they surely will, there will be disorderly protests, like those we see in France. The anger of the jobless, the resulting homeless, the dreamless and the hopeless may get out of order and turn ugly here also.