My Christmas Wish

Perhaps it is the amount of coffee I've consumed this Christmas Eve. Maybe the fact that I'm in my hometown typing this from what was formerly my bedroom but now an office for my family members remaining here. Could even be the way I'm listening to my last.fm radio from here and its playing old songs from high school until now. Anyone of them, I am still reflecting on my years as a high school student, and how I would love to be able to redo it with the little knowledge I have gained in my 2 years since graduation. The amount of political understanding I have gained, musical horizons expanded, and literature covered would make the experience of high school so much more exploitable for meaning. To be capable of sharing this with my desolately boring hometown is beyond my mind's perception.
This was sparked as well by the random article reading on wikipedia, leading to my devouring information on the events of May 68 in France. For a small town boy to comprehend that mere students could spark a revolutionary fervor in the world of French youth and workers alike, is like asking an ante bellum slave owner to accept human rights. Seems like an impossibly unbelievable happening, but it is very true. Despite May 68's eventual political defeat, with the French government winning more support in the elections established as a result of the protests, they're something that culturally Americans could never do. At least not with the way we're socialized today. The students stood up and for one another, they wanted a fairer education system for themselves and future French students. This snowballed into students (college and high school both), teachers, their supporters, and importantly workers demanding an improvement of social standards in France. The workers took factories, without the aid or organization of their unions, working in a unified fashion, like a single union formed from sheer will. Perhaps foolishly they refused the unions negotiated offers for increases of minimum wages and indeed all wages, but they stood on their principles, which were radical. Meetings of tens of thousands of students, speaking about overthrowing their government. Marches with hundreds of thousands demanding the removal of De Gaulle from power ("Adieu, de Gaulle!"), chanted through the streets of Paris. They might not have won electoral victory, they might still not run their own factories, but the French have something Americans can only dream of. The knowledge that they have, and could maybe someday again, unify in solidarity, across student-teacher, student-worker, and intellectual-worker divides to help each other attempt something truly noble.
France is no Soviet Union, Nazi Russia, or Fascist Italy. It was and is, a leading industrialized western nation, yet they did what American students would deem unimaginable. Americans need to lose their air of superiority among the world's nations, and accept that others have done things greater than we have mustered the will to do for ourselves. Europeans are knocking down borders, providing health care for its citizens, and possess far more democratic institutions. All the while, the United States "elects" leaders that continually show disregard for the world's people, in respect to climate change, human rights and starting wars that its unable to justify or maintain in a sensible fashion (if war can ever be done sensibly).
How fun would it be to go to class and recommend an article that might make a radical out of your classmate? Or to quiz one's 10th grade civics teacher of the reasons for Europeans having more democratic elections? Shake a few things up, even if it doesn't result in the a revolution, you did something worthy of doing. As the French graffiti artists of that spring month in 1968 put it, "Soyez réalistes, demandez l'impossible" (Be realistic, ask for the impossible).