Tuesday, April 25, 2006

Online NewsHour: An Analysis of the Return of Student Activism -- April 21, 2006

Online NewsHour: An Analysis of the Return of Student Activism -- April 21, 2006: "A report on a new wave of student activism brought about by September 11th, the Tsunami and Hurricane Katrina.

ANNE TAYLOR FLEMING, NewsHour Essayist: I was struck by the pictures of college kids on spring break, not the ones doing the time-honored bacchanalian thing on the beaches of Florida, but rather the kids who had forsaken that rite and gone instead to New Orleans and the Gulf Coast to help rebuild that battered region.

Swinging hammers, cleaning out moldy shacks, they seemed to me a bright spot in a complicated world, an indication, perhaps, that narcissism was finally giving way to a little activism.

I've got '60s kid nostalgia, no question, a hearkening back to when my peers and I were lit up with help-change-the-world fervor, a sense that we could and should matter, protesting war, advocating women's rights or civil rights."

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