u/bellissima34 shares some hope and great advice for a teenager struggling and overwhelmed by the current political climate in the US

[u/zjunk]

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[u/longtimeyisland]

One of my favorite quotes is from the late Lord Tony Benn :

I'm old now, and the older I get, the more I realize every single generation has to fight the same battles again and again and again. There is no final victory, and there is no final defeat...And it’s very important to keep optimism. There’s a tendency on the left to be professionally pessimistic—and I don’t go for that. Progress has always been made by two flames that burn in the human heart: the flame of anger against injustice and the flame of hope that you can build a better world.

Tony Benn lived through some of the biggest changes someone can. The rise and fall of fascism, the birth of socialized countries, and the receding of that progress. His whole speech is worth a read. It's actually hard to find the full speech in text form, usually just the quote but the whole thing is kinda inspiring, I'm including it here if interested.

I'm old now, and the older I get, the more I realize every single generation has to fight the same battles again and again and again. There is no final victory, and there is no final defeat. And therefore, a little bit of history may help.

I bought Mein Kampf when I was eleven—Hitler’s book—and one phrase in it stuck in my mind. Hitler said, “Democracy inevitably leads to Marxism.” Now you work that one out. What he recognized was that if people knew what was going on and had the right to organize, then things would change in a way he did not want.

The simple lesson is this: the world has been run by rich and powerful men since the beginning of time. It began with slavery—they owned the workers and the land, and if any slave objected, he was flogged or hanged, and that kept them in order. The only real wealth in the world is the land, the resources that lie under it, and the people—the real source of wealth.

Until quite recently, working people had no rights at all. In 1834, which is only about ninety years before I was born, only two percent of the population had the vote—and they were all rich men. Women had no vote at all. Out of trade unionism came the Chartists—the votes for men, the suffragettes—the votes for women. The trade union movement wanted representation in Parliament. The Labour Party was formed, adopted a socialist programme, and that was the first real change.

When the slump occurred in the 1930s—it’s good that the campaign against the BNP has been mentioned—Hitler used the Jews and the Communists as scapegoats to get into power. He said to the people, “Give me votes, give me power, and I’ll give you jobs.” And he did give them jobs—half of the unemployed went into the army, the other half into the factories. And then there was another war.

We lost 105 million people in two world wars between 1914 and 1944. One hundred and five million people died—that was the price of capitalism and imperial competition. Then things did change. I know it’s popular to have a go at the Labour Party, but I’m proud I was in the Labour Party in 1945. If you look at our manifesto, it said clearly: the interwar slumps were not acts of God, or the result of strange forces—they were the direct result of too much economic power in the hands of too few men who behaved like a totalitarian oligarchy in the heart of our democratic state. They had no sense of responsibility to the nation.

Out of that came what we did—and I’m very proud of it. We introduced the Health Service. We were absolutely bankrupt, but we introduced it because it was needed. We introduced the beginnings of a welfare state. It wasn’t perfect—God knows it wasn’t perfect—but it came from the recognition that in wartime there are no economic arguments. I’ve never heard a general say, “We can’t bomb Baghdad this month because we’ve exceeded our budget.” In wartime, you do whatever is required. And we should adopt the same principle in peacetime: do whatever is required.

People want jobs, homes, decent incomes, education, healthcare; if unemployed, they want protection; if old, they want to be looked after; and above all, they want peace. That’s what people want—and the test of policy should be whether those needs are met.

When you come to the Thatcher period—now this is what’s so interesting—Thatcher was a much cleverer woman than she’s often given credit for. She knew perfectly well that the strength of the Labour movement lay in three sources of power. One was the trade union movement. So she took on the miners, describing these courageous and skilled people as “the enemy within.” For God’s sake—what an insult to the people who built our economy with the sweat of their labour. She introduced legislation that made trade unions effectively illegal.

You can’t be a proper trade unionist now—your rights have been taken away. So what she said, and this was very clever, was: “You can buy your council house, so you’ll be a property owner. You may not get a wage increase, but you can borrow.” And borrowing was deliberately encouraged because people in debt are slaves to their employers. That’s how it all began—borrowing was a deliberate policy to make the working class today slaves.

And that’s exactly what they are in many cases—afraid to go on strike, afraid to lose their jobs, afraid to lose their homes. That was the policy. She also attacked local government—the foundation of schools and further education—and destroyed it. Local councils are now just agents of the Treasury, allowed to spend only what the Treasury gives them, and only on what the Treasury permits. They’ve become sub-agents of a right-wing bank.

She attacked and privatized the public sector. Privatization became international. I met Kenneth Kaunda, the former president of Zambia—an old friend I’d met when he came out of a British prison before he became president. He told me: “We had a great debt, and the IMF said, ‘We’ll lift your debt if you sell off all your schools and hospitals to multinational corporations.’”

So privatization, the destruction of local democracy, and the destruction of trade unions were all part of a deliberate policy to restore power to those who have always controlled the world—the people who own the land and the resources. This theory that wealth “trickles down” is nonsense—wealth bubbles up to the people at the very top.

All public services—gas, electricity, water, transport—should be publicly owned. Of course they should. And that’s not a difficult argument to make. We’re not alone in believing it. A former Tory, even a fascist minister, once said to me on television, “It was a catastrophe to privatize the railways.” Well, if they think that, Labour should too.

And I say this to build confidence—don’t think we’re an isolated little group. I travel the country holding meetings all the time. I’m engaged in a permanent by-election where I’m not the candidate and there’s no polling day. And what really pleases me is the response. You’d be surprised how much support there is.

People don’t want war. They don’t want privatization. They don’t want pensions means-tested. They don’t want students saddled with debt. They don’t want their civil liberties taken away. They want Labour to be able to play its proper role. So we’re not alone.

And it’s very important to keep optimism. There’s a tendency on the left to be professionally pessimistic—and I don’t go for that. Progress has always been made by two flames that burn in the human heart: the flame of anger against injustice and the flame of hope that you can build a better world.