The conservatives are passing down the pain to the younger generation. Take a look at Paul Rogat Loeb's new article about how decreasing support for higher education is making it more and more unaffordable for young people, especially those who do not have family wealth to fall back on.
As you think about this, and talk and write about it, tie the need to remedy this situation to basic progressive values: empathy, responsibility, community. By using these basic themes repeatedly, we reinforce them in the minds of others as well as ourselves--we can help shape the public discourse. To get you started, here are a few suggestions:
Empathy: How would you like being in the situation of today's young people, who want to get ahead, but face a crippling debt burden if they go to college? How well do you think you could study, if you were working a full-time job while you were in school?
Responsibility: We want young people to be able to get educated, so they can be better able to support themselves and get ahead--be responsible for making the best of their abilities. And we want them to be responsible for paying for their education--to the extent that working while studying and paying off student loans does not prevent them from benefiting from that education. At the same time, we also think that the rest of us in society should be responsible, too, as we benefit from educating the next generation. After all, most of us, even those without children of our own, benefit economically from being in a country with a well-educated work force that can compete in the global economy, and by not having masses of uneducated and unemployed youth turning to drugs and crime. And finally...
Community. We're all in this together. We were young once, facing our own challenges, and in various ways, our elders helped us. The older generation is always replaced by the younger. It's our role to ensure that we care for all in society, to keep the process going.