The ideology of hardness and cruelty runs through American culture like an electric current.

Young people refuse to be defined exclusively as consumers rather than as workers, and they reject the notion that the only interests that matter are monetary.

The generation of youth in the early 21st century has no way of grasping if they will ever be free from the gnawing sense of the transience, indefiniteness, and provisional nature of any settlement.

Even the notion that, you know,[Bill] Clinton was the black president strikes me as the greatest irony of all times.

There is more to the culture of cruelty than simply ethically challenged policies that benefit the rich and punish the poor, particularly children, there is also the emergence of a punishing state, a governing through crime youth complex, and the emergence of the school-to-prison pipeline as the new face of Jim Crow.

Individual struggles merge into larger social movements.

Abandoned by the existing political system, young people in Oakland, California, New York City, Quebec and numerous other cities throughout the globe have placed their bodies on the line, protesting peacefully while trying to produce a new language, politics, imagine long-term institutions, and support notions of community that manifest the values of equality and mutual respect that they see missing in a world that is structured by neoliberal principles.