At the Risk of Restating the Obvious -- SDS Now

JunkThief had held off mentioning them earlier, but after randomly weaving the new SDS into a conversation yesterday with Friedatella, we at JunkThief were amazed to realize Friendatella was unaware of the revived SDS. And Friendatella is usually so with it and was there...then...and here now.

So we felt obliged to make folks aware that last year the SDS made a much needed comeback with strong roots with their ancestors, as evidenced in their website. It's encouraging to know that they include not just the usual suspects of the campuses of Columbia and UC Berkeley, but also spots in Alabama, Illinois and elsewhere in the heartland (about 200 miles northeast of the spleenland). Oh, maybe there really is hope.

Watching Half Nelson the other night and seeing a 20-something teacher spewing similar politics in an inner city school was equally encouraging. At first the JunkThief gang was a bit concerned that there was not enough explanation of how this committed, articulate socialist ended up a crack addict. Try to hold to those values and live in the year in 2007, and you pretty much have to have a crack addiction to survive. All the same, seeing first Ryan Gosling in Half Nelson and then yesterday's discovery of Adam Kokesh, makes folks at JunkThief wonder if the new left hired a Madison Avenue to sex up the movement. Maybe they learned their lesson after that media blitz with Michael Moore in a Speedo.

There is a great article in the recent New York magazine about this larger movement that includes the Socialists on the campus of Columbia that so upset the dreaded Matt Sanchez. Matt Sanchez? You remember him, the forgotten flavor of last month.

What may take some folks a while to wrap their heads around is that today's SDS members were born just before or during the Bush I administration and are probably too young to remember the First Gulf War.