As they mature they will have the opportunity to adapt their ideas, like all of us.
That's the bright side, it being accepted wisdom that socialism is merely utopian, it is likely that most socialists of the future will be people who have overcome the accepted wisdom, as opposed to merely settling for the accepted wisdom.
You have to admit that many older socialists have never really thought it through. So it bodes well for a better quality of socialist in the future.
Bill Bartlett Bracknell Tas
At 11:58 AM -0800 17/2/06, andie nachgeborenen wrote:
>Have had interesting and rather depressing chats about
>socialist politics with my teenage kids, one a 16 year
>old HS junior, another an almost 13-year old middle
>schooler (now reading Orwell's 1984) on his own, both
>very smart and fairly politically aware, quite
>progressive in their values -- antiwar,
>anti-imperialist, antiracist, anti-corporate,
>pro-union, feminist. But utterly skeptical about the
>possibility or point of socialism -- not that they
>have a sophisticated understanding, though they both
>have the general idea that it involves the workers
>running things. Or that their objections are
>particularly sophisticated or novel. (Generally comes
>to, A good idea in theory but it won't work in
>practice.) But what's somewhat dispiriting is the lack
>of hope for a future that is better than this. One
>can't say the view's irrational, and maybe some of it
>is just self-assertion of a sort normal and natural to
>teenagers. But I wonder how common it is, and I bet
>it's pretty common. Now, I don't really think we're
>the "last generation" of socialists; no doubt things
>will change when, as must happen, resistance reignites
>for whatever reason. But I can't say these
>conversations fill me with joy. jks
>
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