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You'd think with the internet and all of these social tools and abilities to collaborate easily people could form concrete, simple, and effective messages to rally around, even if the underlying structure and goals were more broad and complicated. The thing that bugs me about these protests is that they fail to achieve either of those things. Their message is complicated and muddied, their goals undefined, and their ability to gain any sort of acceptance by a voting block, or even a popular revolutionary block is nil.
Also there is way too much hyperbole in their messages. Things are not good in the US, they are no where near good, but they are also no where near Egypt, Libya, or Syria bad. We don't have tanks in the streets, we don't have rebel groups, we don't have mass murder committed against our own citizens. These are things that galvanize and motivate a populace to revolt, and its even more true today than it was when we had our first revolution. People are too complacent for them to actually risk anything for change in this country. The problem isn't that they are coerced into being complacent, its that the quality of life in this country still reaches the bare minimum for most people and so they are happy.
Look at China as an example, they are going in the opposite direction. Their quality of life was horrible, and the student democracy movements of the 1980s resulted from that. As their quality of life improved their desire for radical change subsided and they have become mostly complacent. Their quality of life on average is probably somewhat lower on average than the people in the US, but the results are still the same. Even mediocre industrialized, first world standards are enough to keep most people happy enough to not try and make things better for themselves, especially when they have a society that gives them a semblance of free will like our republic does.
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