> I was thinking of that as I wrote the post, and I don't know. I don't
> have any real sense of what made the movement to Seattle tick, since I
> was not an active part of it. Were the '90s as a whole a fairly upbeat
> period for those who made up the bulk of Seattle protestors? And could
> the moderate level of success achieved reflect the middling length of
> the uptick as a whole? In 1965 almost everyone had been finding things
> better and better for about 20 years. And the leisure that university
> students could achieve was growing rather than shrinking. Wages went up
> in the late '90s, but leisure did not, for anyone.
There was is no casuality associated between the Seattle protests and the economy of the 1990s. Seattle was part of an international day of protest called N30, which was the result of much hard activist work and the culmination of several long-running struggles which reached synergy during N30.
I can't believe that a bunch of smart people on this list still think that dissent is tied in with these arbitrary time periods such as "the 60s." Activism and dissent happen all the time. People who dissent are active agents in the change they create, not some passive pawns of econo-historic forces.
Chuck0