I’ll add to this, also many are too broke and exhausted working overtime or multiple jobs just to survive week to week… and that was by design!

Look up Nixon and Reagan defunding public universities and allowing them to charge more for tuition. Look up Nixon’s administration’s actual reason for starting the drug war - I’ll save you that step it was to target black communities, specifically black organizers, and anti-war Vietnam protestors, especially on college campuses. Then look at the beginning of the end of good paying US manufacturing jobs under Reagan and why that administration started to open up global trade agreements to ship those jobs overseas - then see almost every subsequent administration do it even more… granted Biden did attempt to build up some through the infrastructure and CHIPs bills, the bureaucracy around those bills though are gonna take a decade to see all the results.

But anyways, those policies weren’t just about “smaller government”, “stoping indoctrination”, “saving Americans from the scourge of drugs” or “bigger profits to the wealthy corporations”.

Their primary goal, and there are records of their statements on this, was about preventing another 60’s protest movement from ever happening again - no more civil rights movements, no more anti-war protests, no more feminist movements, no more college campus protests, they wanted that all to end by making life harder and taking away any semblance of free time for free though or any organized movement to take root.

If kids can’t afford to go to college then they’ll have to take out loans, and if they get into debt then they’re gonna have to take the first job available, maybe not even a good job, especially if we shipped a bunch of those overseas, and now they’re trapped in a debt cycle at a shitty paying job, exhausted, constantly working and have no time to focus on what’s happening in the country or politics let alone organize.

Or maybe young people don’t go to college and just go straight into the workforce, well most of the good jobs that don’t require secondary education, those are gone or outsourced now and a lot of other good paying jobs are gonna start requiring a college degree for applications even if it’s not necessary for the role and wasn’t ever needed in the past - how about minimum wage and multiple jobs just to survive - too exhausted and too broke to organize.

And then of course you’re miserable or maybe not miserable yet just wanting to experiment so you get some weed or coke or maybe even heroin, whatever you get up to on the weekends, but whoops you’re in an over policed area or you get profiled and you get caught with those drugs and now you’re going to prison for a minimum sentence - can’t organize and in most states now you can’t vote. Granted obviously laws have changed in several states around this, but not all and many republican politicians want to go back to more criminalization, because a bonus is all that private prison donor money.

Yes, it’s not impossible to work hard, get ahead, and live comfortably but it’s definitely harder today than it was between 1950-1973. In fact studies show it’s harder today to work your way out of the socioeconomic class you were born into. That’s absolutely fucked.

I totally agree with your premise that a lot of Americans are lazy and complacent and it’s not quite “bad enough” to risk giving up any comforts they currently have. But for the folks that aren’t comfortable and many who are suffering in our failed system, this shit was by design and unfortunately in many cases it’s only gotten worse over the last 50 years, we’re just all around the culmination of all those shitty policies.

I don’t know what the breaking point looks like, I don’t know if any of us want to see it get that bad considering something should have given 20 years ago. Maybe, just maybe we get some kind of organized opposition party (not the democrats) that actually speak for the majority of Americans to un-ratfuck America and the shitty policies that got us here. I don’t know, but here where are.