See also: LaRouche Conference Keynote
LaRouche Launches Youth Movement
To Rebuild America
by Muriel Mirak-WeissbachA revolution has begun inside the United States, led by a rare collection of young people, who, having grasped the nature of the historical period we are living in, have decided to dedicate their lives to ensuring that the world will not descend into a New Dark Age, but rather initiate a new Renaissance. These young Americans—political "canaries in the mine"—have been joining Lyndon LaRouche's campaign in increasing numbers as the collapse has come on during 2002.
LaRouche gathered the leadership of this new international youth movement, at the semi-annual conference of the International Caucus of Labor Committees and Schiller Institute on "The Global Financial Crash of 2002," attended by 1,000, in Reston, Virginia over the Labor Day weekend. On this weekend which traditionally looks forward to November election days, LaRouche's keynote speech also detailed an "emergency November program" to rebuild the transport and economic infrastructure of the United States, which is collapsing in bankruptcy shutdowns. He is "presenting the President and the incoming Congress with the emergency program they must immediately adopt" to stop the disintegration of the U.S. economy; and the youth movement is mobilized with this idea.
Generation With 'No Future'
LaRouche is a world-historic individual in this crisis, as Franklin Delano Roosevelt—whom he cited as a model in his keynote—was such a personality who revived the nation from the last Depression. In giving the youth now joining him, greater freedom and responsibility in his movement, he stressed that the key to acquiring the courage required to lead in a time of crisis, is the sense of personal identity, based on the knowledge that, although life is mortal, one achieves immortality, through doing something "which was needed, in honor of past mankind, and for the sake of the future of mankind."
Over the course of the past generation, the "Baby Boomer" generation of those born after World War II, everything that had been achieved by Roosevelt has been destroyed. The shift from producer to "consumer society," the rock-drug-sex counterculture, and the fixation on "personal needs," as opposed to the the general welfare on which FDR based his Presidency, has made the U.S. economy a global looting machine, now thoroughly breaking down. It has produced a youth whose self-conception is "the no-future generation," to whom no future mission is offered in school, economy, or society. They respond now to LaRouche's message that they have to make their own future by a mission to rebuild America and the world.
Cultural pessimism is pervasive among this generation; they have no sense of truth or mission. Many college-age youth do not even wear watches, as they have no sense of time. The "counterculture" which their parents adopted from the 1960s, and have made the dominant culture of present-day America, has eliminated Classical culture, robbing youth of a sense of history, of science and technological progress.
Their advantage, however, as West Coast LaRouche movement leader Philip Rubinstein pointed out, is that by 1998-99, they knew they had "no future." Whereas their Baby Boomer parents still nurture illusions that they can somehow survive in the stock and real estate markets and have enough money to retire—"or at least to pay for their funeral"—the generation of 18- to 25-year-olds realize the system is gone, and that their education is a fraud, preparing them for nothing they actually face.
When confronted with the moral and intellectual challenge represented by LaRouche, and by his uncanny ability to forecast economic and political developments, they respond with shock and intrigue, and a desire to learn how he was able to do so. For example, LaRouche's warning on Nov. 3, 2000, that the Presidential elections would not be decided on Election Day; and his January 2000 published insistence that the omnipotent Enron, then ripping up California, had to collapse; proved to many youth that LaRouche uniquely "knows what he is talking about."
Some 25-30 of the youth movement's organizers told the story from their own vantage point during the Sept. 1 evening plenary. A young man from Los Angeles who has been organizing for LaRouche since late 2001, recalled his first contact with LaRouche, as "phenomenal, unbelievable," but that he then thought: "If what he is saying is true, what does that require of me?" A college girl whose father had told her that life was without purpose, related her awareness during her first attendance at a Schiller Institute cadre school, that it was a "profound moment.... Finally I found people who would discuss philosophy, who were doing something." Others emphasized their sense of the enormous responsibility they had taken on, by joining LaRouche's movement at such a time of breakdown crisis.
Several said they had thought at first, that it would be "easy" to recruit their friends and contemporaries to the movement, but soon found otherwise. A student leader from California reported his confrontation with other students during a demonstration, who were deriding the speakers with the deep pessimism common to so many students, saying, "The fool is the one who thinks he can do something to change the world." But this leader emphasized to the conference, "Think big. Maybe I'll be called upon to go to Congo-Zaire, or to Brazil, to help implement LaRouche's policies. That's what this youth movement is for: to implement the new monetary system, and avoid a Dark Age." Its national purpose, of course: To put LaRouche in the White House in 2004.
