By Bell Clemens, ADVANCE CONTRIBUTOR
Like many Americans, I have been watching the student uprisings in France and all over the world in the last few weeks with something close to envy. The grievances are nearly identical: the underfunding of education and the overspending on conflict and war, the cost of living and housing soaring while pay remains stagnant, and the ultra-wealthy not paying their fair share.
My students, seeing it unfold on their TikTok feeds, and knowing I once lived in France, keep asking me, “Why doesn’t this stuff happen here?”
What do you tell a teenager? How do you begin to explain the cultural and systemic differences that have led to an often pearl-clutching, yet overly mild American body politic, who, in a quote often misattributed to Steinbeck, have never seen themselves as “an exploited proletariat, but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires”?
And yet, while a French-style uprising is far from an American reality (our students, while I love them, aren’t yet quoting Rousseau from fiery, revolutionary hearts as I’ve seen the lycéens do), we still have a bold few willing to speak up.
At what was essentially a weapons trade show in mid-October, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth appeared on a panel with top civilian leadership before a crowd replete with industry representatives to push not only a $1.5 trillion “defense” budget, but also for Pentagon funding to purchase the shiniest and newest weapons in autonomous warfare. These ranged from kamikaze, long-range strike and bomber drones, to robotic fighter jets, to autonomous software and counter-drone systems.
American resistance still has a pulse, as the typical agents of the industrial empire weren’t the only people in attendance. Shortly after the crowd settled in from Hegseth’s standing ovation, a banner reading “No War With Iran” was unfurled, and voices began to cry out. The first, somewhat inaudible, ended with “body parts under the rubble!”
“She thinks highly of me,” Hegseth quipped, and the crowd laughed and applauded.
A few moments later, voices shouted, “War criminal! You’re not a warrior! You’re a coward!” followed by “Children in Gaza are starving!” then, “...making money off of bombs killing my family!”
“We spend $1.5 trillion on war… children in America are starving!”
“How many children… in Palestine and Gaza—” was cut off by that favorite refrain of a likely shocked and awed audience, “USA! USA! USA!”
The room bristled, and as more activists managed to shout out more condemnations—the most hopeful of which was, “We’ll see you at the goddamn Hague!”—the panel simply began to speak over them.
Each demonstrator, of course, was removed or carried away, but what struck me most was the cognitive dissonance it must take, to hear and to know and to understand the things those activists said, but to laugh and “USA!” it all away. I suppose it’s easy when you’re about to generate a lot of shareholder value. Some millionaires, actually, aren’t embarrassed after all.
Almost a week later, in Ohio on a stop on his “Arsenal of Freedom” tour, Hegseth said to the employees of an aerospace and defense contractor, “The Department of War is open for business.” Not to be outdone, two days later Lockheed Martin’s CEO Jim Taiclet assured investors that demand for the corporation’s weapons appears “permanent.”
My students recently analyzed some Dwight D. Eisenhower quotes, in a guns-versus-butter-style lesson focused on opportunity cost. “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed,” the five-star general, Supreme Allied Commander, decorated war hero, and two-term Republican president stated.
With Hegseth’s adventures and Taiclet’s words haunting me, I couldn’t help but reflect on the late president’s warnings about the influence of the military-industrial complex, and a current Secretary of Defense essentially admitting the American war machine is now utterly, and totally, transactional.
The point was driven home even harder, just a few days later, when the Washington Post broke a story about Hegseth’s staff, who, back in February, instead of waiting for furloughed Army curators, tried to move Eisenhower’s globe themselves, the very one still bearing the strategic marks he left on it during World War II. Unfortunately, surprising absolutely no one, they dropped and broke it.
Some days the metaphors write themselves. A dangerously incompetent former television host turned Secretary of Defense, obsessed not only with optics but also with mocking the vulnerable, and as unapologetic about war crimes as he is Christian nationalist tattoos and calls for holy war, has literally and figuratively played a hand in breaking the globe.
Contrast this with a man like Eisenhower who, while no saint, arguably helped save the free world from fascism, privately disdained Joe McCarthy and his Red-scare tactics, and who urged us as a country to be on guard against the unwarranted influence of the military-industrial complex. Who warned us that “this world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.” Who said that a country which chooses to make this Faustian bargain, in fact is left hanging from a “cross of iron.”
Hegseth understands the cross as a cosplaying crusader does, as something to be slapped on a shield, or in his case, his chest, and hide behind. Eisenhower understood it as a place to solemnly hang our sins.
Eisenhower’s warning screams at us through the pages of history books that many American students (and adults) haven’t bothered to crack open. Yet his artifact, as precious as it is to our nation’s story, can hopefully be repaired. The world order that Hegseth has gleefully and likely drunkenly plowed his ego and greed into, not so much. One of these men truly understood the human cost of war, the other seems to only understand its market.
It is not my job to tell students what to think, but to help them learn how to think, to help them develop the critical and cognitive skills that, according to recent research, are rapidly degrading in a world of brain rot, looksmaxxing, and doom scrolling. In a world where our young people are more aware of Tesla’s flying car announcement than they are of Elon Musk’s ability to donate hundreds of millions of dollars to influence one single midterm election, addressing this cognitive crisis has become more urgent than ever.
In a recent class about lobbying, my students researched various industries, the bills and laws they’ve influenced, and current, related news items. A frontrunner emerged quickly—the defense industry. Someone spoke up, “If there’s this much money involved, then what reason is there to ever stop wars?”
The distractions our young people face here in the United States are overwhelming, and it’s not just their attention spans that are suffering. Unlike their peers in France, our students are working jobs well into the late-evening hours to help families with bills. They have been “No Child Left Behind-ed” into learned helplessness. And in many instances, we the over-worked and over-exploited adults have left them to their digital babysitters, rather than collectively working toward instilling in them a sense of civic and intellectual duty.
And those who should lead our most powerful offices with integrity, gravitas, and dignity, are busy basking in chants of “USA! USA!” that mind-numbing, thought-terminating cliché they can deploy when confronted with their own hypocrisy or any dissent.
These students, who, in between viral dances, make-up tutorials, and the ramblings of podcast bros, did pay attention when watching a live-streamed genocide—and who are now, on their phones, catching on to what’s shaping up to be a global uprising—can only be fooled for so long.
While a massive student-led movement or a general strike here in the land of the free and the home of the brave is unlikely to happen in the immediate future (and if it does, it would be met with the harshest, best-funded, and most violent of crackdowns), we do still have righteous Americans willing to unfurl a banner and confront a room of the powerful and wealthy, and demand justice over profit.
More importantly, more young people are waking up to the fact that cruel, violent, and greedy men are pillaging their futures. And those men are doing so with a chuckle, a cheer, and one hand in our pockets and the other in each other’s. With any luck, our kids are not only noticing it, they’re asking the right questions.
And the answers to those questions are so easy, maybe even adults can get it, too.
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“Bell Clemens” is a local educator who, in between teaching and writing, is currently touching grass, and encourages you to do the same.
Your students should read about the nationwide anti-Vietnam war protests in the late 1960’s led by students in Chicago, in Washington DC, and at many universities including Columbia and Kent State. Of course, in those days they had a personal stake because of the draft.