War is one of the nation's most honored virtues, and its militaristic values now bear down on almost every aspect of American life.

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.

I think we can see violence in a whole range of realms. We certainly see it in the media, where extreme violence is now so pervasive that people barely blink when they see it, and certainly raise very few questions about what it means pedagogically and politically. Violence is the DNA, the nervous system of this system's body politic.

America has become amnesiac - a country in which forms of historical, political, and moral forgetting are not only willfully practiced but celebrated.

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.

War is one of the nation's most honored virtues, and its militaristic values now bear down on almost every aspect of American life.

The social media not only become new platforms for the invasion of privacy, but further legitimate a culture in which monitoring functions are viewed as benign while the state-sponsored society of hyper-fear increasingly defines everyone as either a snitch or a terrorist.