For many of today’s young people, the student activism of the 1960s is a nebulous concept. Knowledge of that era has dwindled to a collection of disconnected images and soundbytes, mostly relating to popular culture and drug-taking; our understanding of the politics of the 1960s has atrophied to the extent that when Prime Minister Tony Blair issued his bizzare edict linking modern binge drinking to the counter-culture movement, many actually agreed with him.

There is an antidote, readily available on the internet: Mario Savio’s address from the steps of Sproul Hall, on 2 December 1964. The power of his words is their undoing, because they need no context to captivate the listener.

“There’s a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart that you can’t take part, you can’t even passively take part; and you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears, and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop, and you’ve got to indiciate to the people who run it—the people who own it—that unless you’re free, the machine will be prevented from running at all.”

In an event at this year’s Edinburgh International Book Festival on the ‘60s protest movement, St Andrew’s history professor Gerard de Groot—whose latest book, The Sixties Unplugged, has provoked the ire of ageing hippies by questioning the value and effectiveness of their actions—managed to get the last word, despite sharing the stage with Tariq Ali. “When I showed the Savio clip to my students, they didn’t get it – their response was, ‘well, what’s his problem?’”

For the most part, his problem was arbitrary arrest and the suppression of free speech. Berkeley officials had banned all forms of political activity and fundraising, thereby denying Savio’s group, the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee, from operating on campus. The group was an organisation of students who played an active role in the civil rights movement; when a member of a sister organisation, the Congress of Racial Equality, was arrested for manning an information table on campus, Savio led a 32-hour sit-in to prevent the squad car taking his classmate to prison.

This level of oppression is simply inconceivable today. That the editors of this newspaper are free to distribute it to Edinburgh’s students without fear of arbitrary arrest and imprisonment—without being pursued and investigated in secret by the intelligence services, as Savio was by the FBI for over ten years—illustrates why modern students fail to relate to with their ‘60s antecedents: their experience is too alien for us to understand their fervour.

Those who don’t understand the passion or significance of Savio’s rhetoric are asking the wrong question. Instead of wondering what his problem was, we should ask: what’s ours?

This generation may lack the injustice of the Vietnam War and the unquestionable justice of the civil rights movement to rally around, but our society is far from perfect, and one need not look far to find ample cause to speak out. The United States continues to hold hundreds of innocent people hostage at Guantanamo Bay, including civilians and minors; this government has just introduced legislation forcing foreigners to surrender their privacy and submit to state surveillance; the independence of the UK’s parliamentarians has been undermined by a police investigation; we have discovered that seven unelected and unaccountable individuals have the power to implement arbitrary censorship of the internet; and all the while, the bodies returning home from Iraq and Afghanistan are overwhelmingly those of young men and women, different from us only in their choice of career.

It seems that apathy is assumed of people our age. The evidence, however, indicates the contrary – on the streets of the United States during the recent election, on the runway at Stansted airport before dawn, and over the past fews days on the streets of Athens and other Greek cities. The spirit of ’68 only sleeps; but deeply.