Well, they did just come out of schools where metal detectors and police patrolling the halls was the enforced norm. They rode to school in busses with cameras that watched their every move.

How can we expect them to suddenly expect freedom, when they've never had it?

> To them, it's excusable for rights to be violated if they feel enough justified anger.

I don't think this is specific to young people, or to the present time. Everyone will be very noble when talking about rights in the abstract, but they quickly throw that away when it's the rights of a specific group they don't like. I was struck by it after the London riots last year, when there were loud calls for looters to be punished beyond what the judicial system normally allows. You can see the same attitude to terrorism.

Don't even try to blame this on the youth. They are still to apathetic to even count. We only have ourselves to blame for this. It is our mess to fix.

Thanks for that! We're just now trying to establish lives for ourselves in one of the worst economic climates since the great depression. That's hard enough without having the responsibility of fixing politics and government foisted upon us as well...

I think he was actually saying that this responsibility should be on the 30-, 40- and 50-year-olds, who are already in the working world and are old enough to have seen (and voted for/against) several of the people in all levels of government who have made the choices that brought us here.

For now, focus on your life, and getting yourself in a position to contribute to the movement in the future.

Is this any surprise for people who grew up in a country where invading countries on false pretexts was seen as the right thing to do, where criticizing the government was seen as bad no matter what the reasons are, and where the threat of terrorism is somehow hyped up far beyond the perceived threat of nuclear annihilation in the Cold War?

I saw this coming when the WTC rubble was still smoking. The government could have potentially worked to calm down the populace, but instead they amplified the fear. We've been paying the price ever since.

They also believe anything that makes them unhappy is a violation of their own rights.

This seems like more of a personal opinion of yours than anything based on fact.

It's what I've observed.