Slaying Dinosaurs and Dragons or when the young confront their elders and the elders show their unworthiness to be elders

[Trevor Hill, left, is an economics student at New York University. Eliecer Avila, right, was a student at the Universidad de las Ciencias Informáticas]

Two infamous incidents reveal a glaring problem with our activism and our movements

Trevor Hill vs. Nancy Pelosi

The first is from a young college student, Trevor Hill, who confronts California Democrat, Rep. Nancy Pelosi [San Francisco] about young people's attitudes toward socialism.

Note in this interview with the Democratic Socialists of America where Hill says he was supposed to ask a different, “softball” question?

He went off script, thankfully, and Pelosi essentially said “we don’t hear you.” There is something encouragingly, but thinly, Marxist about her answer, when she attributes the wealth created as being created by the workers: unfortunately, she believes this wealth belongs to the owners, and that we are supposed to beg for it. But it makes me mindful that we too handpick our audiences to ask softball or scripted questions.

It also makes me regret that my party, the Communist Party USA, needs to be picking up young women and men, like Hill, who are ripe for the picking.

Eliecer Avila vs Ricardo Alarcon

This interaction reminds me of another off-script moment, which was just as ridiculous but was widely mocked and manipulated in the Western, bourgeois media for other reasons.

That is when another young student, Eliecer Avila, a young Cuban technology student, asked Ricardo Alarcon, then president of Cuba’s National Assembly of People's Power about why Cubans had to work for pesos and buy goods in dollars:

“That means a worker has to work two or three days to buy a toothbrush.”

Avila asked Alarcon why Cubans were forbidden from hotels and tourist shops, to which Alarcon replied incongruently that when he was stationed in New York City non-Anglo people were treated badly in stores.

Avila asked about restrictions on foreign travel, to which Alarcon responded if everyone flew there’d be catastrophes in the skies.

I say this not to mock Alarcon, who served the Revolution well, better than millionairess Pelosi has served the working class, Blacks, and the poor, but this Cuban upper statesman and member of the Politburo doesn't seem to have a clue what the young people are thinking any more than Pelosi, and the recent purges within the Democratic National Committee of leftists and Sanders supporters proves this.

Antiques Road Shows

This means we not only have an economic problem called capitalism, which siphons money and resources from the poor and guarantees the rich, but we have a generational problem, where old guards exceed their relevance and become those antiques we think are valuable but then the appraisers from "Antiques Roads Show" assess them as fakes.

This is the class of people who love to shoot invective at undemocratic regimes, when I don't think they care two bits about democracy. Just power and privilege.

One-time mayor of San Francisco and right-wing Democratic US Senator, Dianne Feinstein has just announced she is seeking yet another term at 84 years old. This is a pitiful story arc that needn't have happened. At ne time, Feinstein was a rising female Democrat in an establishment of men; she was considered vice presidential material because she lead [thanks to the assassinations of the Mayor and city councilman, Harvey Milk, because her bid to become mayor failed] a major US city. But the longer she stayed in that sun, the more the system steeped her.

Hill was able to join the DSA, and they are damn lucky to have him I'm sure. Avila, who had described himself as a Revolutionary, was effectively exiled for his impertinence and lives today in Havana where he gets harassed by the authorities for speaking out against the shortcomings of Cuban policy. It has been suggested, though not proven, he is being funded now by the Miami Mafioso. This is as dark a story arc as Feinstein's and it didn't have to be.

Our radical coalitions have barely dealt with the race issue, where often the leadership looks exactly like those Polo shirt-wearing, Tiki torch-carrying white nationalists in Charlottesville. And the men's club is often exactly as a younger Dianne Feinstein found the Democratic Party in the 1970's. So to burden our radical movements with more requirements might seem too much, it is necessary. It is necessary that the young be put there.

Those who are too fragile can be made into kindling.