teen age crisis Wall Street Journal - More capitalist propaganda.

When I was young I served some time in the merchant marine. One trip took me with a load of grain to the port of Gdansk in Poland. This was then a Stalinist country. At night the city was lit only with very dim yellow lights. After being in New York, Toronto, New Orleans, Vancouver, all major capitalist cities with their non stop bright lights and flashing neon advertising signs I suffered a bit of a culture shock. This was terrible I thought. But after a few days I began to get used to it. Even began to like it and feel less stressed.

Then we sailed and went to Naples, Sydney, Perth and back to Genoa in Italy. Again major capitalist cities with their bright lights and flashing neon advertising signs. I then suffered the opposite. I found these bright lights and flashing signs extremely aggressive and stressful. I was being continually over stimulated. I began to long for the dim lights of Gdansk.

I was thinking of this yesterday when I read the article in the Wall street Journal about today's teenagers so many of whom suffer from so called attention deficit disorder and other behavioral difficulties. The entire thrust of the article was that the solution to this was increased vigilance on behalf of the parents and take the teenagers to psychiatrists as soon as any danger signs appeared.

There was not a word about what could be the cause of such a crisis amongst young people. Never has there been a society with such extreme over stimulation as today. Everywhere you look there are flashing lights, TV screens, video games, phones that can do all sorts of things, internet connections from little machines you can carry in your pocket. Capitalism is assaulting today's teens and all of us with the most extreme savagery. It is just about impossible to get the time and the place to relax and contemplate. On top of this we have to work so hard to survive that there is no time to reflect. It is a miracle that anybody avoids having attention deficit disorder.

So back to the Wall Street Journal's article on teenage behavioral crisis. As usual they refuse to discuss the responsibility of the capitalist system for any crisis. But it is capitalism that is at the root of the teenage crisis. We are dealing with a crisis of the system. This is what must be faced. The capitalists want us to think it is our problem, that the parents are to blame, that the solution is to drug the youth or to send them to a psychiatrist. This is more capitalist propaganda. We have to seek the cause and the cause is the capitalist system and how it assaults the youth.

To go back to my own youth again. Attention deficit disorder and today's youth behavioral problems in the main did not exist in rural Ireland when I was growing up. That is because capitalism and technology were much less dominant there then. This does not mean they do not exist today. They do. However we have to reject the capitalist propaganda that these are our fault and point the finger of blame to where it belongs, that is at capitalism. And from this draw the conclusion that we have to organize and struggle for an alternative to capitalism in which our children can escape the aggressive attacks of the criminal corporations and their criminal capitalist system. We have to struggle for a humane system, that is a democratic socialist system.

Sean.