The war had come home in a very visceral way that spring when the Ohio National Guard opened fire on antiwar protesters at Kent State University, killing four students. As the '60s song lyric put it, they were willing to kill for peace. Shades of the spring of '70. Take Otpor, the anti-Milosevic student resistance movement that has galvanized support among Serbians of all ages. As we go to press, Otpor's following grows daily, and the Milosevic regime, recognizing Otpor's capacity to mobilize the country, has aimed its arsenal of reprisals against the young activists.
Universities often serve as the incubators of political youth movements.
And, as they did in the United States and Europe during the '60s and '70s, student movements can precipitate a wider societal rebirth of hope in the possibility of far-reaching change. Regimes in such countries as Kenya, Iran, Mexico, Serbia, and Peru in recent years have turned on their own kids, closing down universities, arresting and beating students to smother nascent opposition. While often shocking in its intensity and violence, this intergenerational hostility is but a variant of our domestic discord in the 1960s. Just as kids' pop-cultural standards stem from a common global iconography, political youth movements reflect the porosity of borders that characterizes this historical moment. Young people are often trapped between the burden of their elders' prejudices or grievances and their own longing to find a better way to live.