THE GANTT REPORT: Today’s students spend too much time on Facebook and Twitter

American students should be ashamed.

Young people all around the world are rising up against government and corporate exploitation. And what are American students doing? Sitting on their behinds, hoping for the best, playing cards and flunking all of their tests.

The world’s economic crisis was rooted in the United States when banks, mortgage and insurance companies concocted a scheme to steal all of the money that they could while American students sat back and watched.

American students lost their direction, forgot their history and jeopardized their future.

We hear a lot about the “heroes” that so-called institutions of higher learning want us to know but American students seem to fail to realize their roles in civil rights, equal rights anti-war and other protests.   

We love Martin Luther King Jr. but there were hundreds of black college students who were arrested just as many times as Dr. King was arrested. They marched just as much, sat-in just as much, protested just as much and fought just as hard as our elderly preachers and teachers fought for American and world justice.

We have heard about the NAACP, the SCLC and groups like CORE but I wonder if students have heard of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, the Students for a Democratic Society, The Weathermen, The Malcolm X Liberation Front, the All African Revolutionary Party or the Black Federation.

When I was in college, all you had to do to get a crowd was to run through the student union and scream that somebody, anybody, was being mistreated. Back then, it was honorable to be an activist. Now you couldn’t get a crowd of students to a protest rally if you gave away free hair weaves and fake gold chains.

The Gantt Report urges American students, especially black students, to unite, stand up and speak out about the way the people are being oppressed, exploited, victimized and bamboozled by the corporate, financial and military industrial complexes.

I’m not suggesting you charge the vehicles of political leaders the way British students threw down on Prince Charles. All students have to do is read more books than they read Facebook status updates or Twitter tweets. All students have to do is watch more news programs and fewer music videos.

Students have to seek the truth and refuse to settle for watered-down versions of why we are catching the hell that we are catching. Students can start by demanding that colleges and universities go back to being forums for open discussions of important topics.

People who have a different perspective or opinion than modern-day colonialists and neo-colonialists are not allowed on campuses because the students don’t care what they learn or who teaches them.

If you ever wonder why some say things were better in the 1960s than they are now in 2010, talk to some U.S. college students.

If the students rise up, the community will rise up with them and bring about real change instead of the fake, imaginary political “change” that America has grown to love.