A new year is upon us. And even before its first hour has been rung in, 2012 is already taking shape before us as a pivotal year in global politics. We can all feel the awakening under way. A revived longing for equality, shared prosperity and democratic solidarity is inspiring a vibrant new politics around the world. This new activist spirit is quickened by the keen apprehension of young people on every continent that something is very, very wrong with the present economic and political order. The rising generation, heirs to sick and damaged societies that have been unbalanced by decades of plutocratic rule and antisocial cupidity, have now begun to rouse themselves – and in the process they have rallied the moral outrage of their fellow citizens. In the face of so much hope and energy, cynicism falls increasingly mute. The young occupiers of the public squares are giving new heart to all of those older, beleaguered reformers who worried that they might never see real change in their countries during their own lifetimes. Young people almost everywhere – from the defiant street vendor Mohamed Boazizi in Tunisia to the indignados in Spain to the participants in the Occupy movement across the United States and elsewhere – are rejecting the destruction wrought on their societies by a debased system of economic predation, environmental recklessness, elite privilege, corporate fraud and sheer inhuman greed. The youthful protestors are determined to restore democratic society and human decency, and redeem the dimming promise of their common future, and they have set their sights on the global dictatorship of big money. The 1%, once complacent in their impregnable fortresses of cash, can be heard to speak in worried tones of late. They lean pensively from their tower windows, no longer quite so comfortably aloof, and hear the rebel footfalls down on the streets in the dark.
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