The people pulling together #occupycharleston, a Wall Street type protest planned for here, emerge from a culture disconnected from the traditional sources of stability and control which have dominated life in South Carolina since the end of the Civil War. What they choose to do and how they do it may be unlike anything this state has ever seen before.

The war stories passed down to me by the small cadre of aging Vietnam protestors still holding out in the Palmetto State today describe a hostile political and social environment in the early 1970s.

The anti war movement arrived in South Carolina late. It didn't last long. By the time I appeared at the University of South Carolina in 1978, my thoughts and politics were seen as the horrifying leading edge of a reactionary return to tradition.

You would have thought I had written "God and Man" at Yale myself.

For those aging activists, whose determination I have come to respect, that part of their public witness as a citizen was brief and tough. For most, it wilted in a storm of hostility and isolation.

What they read about themselves in the local newspapers and saw on TV, was debilitating. After it was over, most left S.C.

The young people putting Occupy Charleston together are not isolated. They drafted me for their legal committee since I'm one of the few lawyers in town who might come and pry them out of jail if they're arrested.

They have used the Internet to track down every progressive attorney in the state and entered our phone numbers in their smart phones.

The lawyers ask for formal consultation meetings. They tweet us with updates. Attorneys live in the world of 10 day notice periods for motions. They hurl towards their destinies on Meetup at the speed of WI-FI and 3G.

These Charleston activists are informed by, connected to and mobile across the nation and world. Some spent last weekend in New York, visiting the demonstration on Wall Street. Others have been to the occupations in Asheville, the Southeast's mecca of progressive activism.

Most have received the news of this new movement over the Internet, on Youtube, Twitter and above all, Facebook In New York, they went from having no funding to putting out their own newspaper in 48 hours, published on a street corner and read across a nation.

These Charleston activists are as close to the occupations in Seattle, Portland, D.C., Atlanta and Austin as the I-phone in their pockets. This movement doesn't crave broad cultural affirmation. It needs charging stations.

They are determined to define themselves. They recognize hearing the counsel of their own souls above the roar of events and commerce is part of their struggle. They will resent what I say about them next, which must be less than the truth.

They are attempting to pull together a protest movement and a new vision for their divided country when nearly everything around them is in pieces. Most of them come from what some would once have called "broken" families. Their parents have married, divorced and remarried. Some have had brothers and sisters check out of their lives.

Watergate, Iran Contra and even Monica Lewinski are all history to them. They have never seen a country strong and confident enough to put a man on the moon or vanquish a major disease like Polio. Their parents have struggled with employment far less secure than my parent's generation. They have seen nothing but war most of their lives. Their earliest memory of public affairs is often the earthward plunge of the towers in New York.

They know they have been lied to and manipulated. They know there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. They trace the conflicted accounts of the trillions which were hurled at the prospect of a global economic collapse in 2008 and who earned billions in profits as a result. They know exactly how many private jets are in the fleets of our major banks and how many tellers those banks are planning to lay off next month.

They do not believe things are working now. They have little confidence things will work in their futures. If they are wrong, there is no trusted cultural authority with the power to correct them, not even President Obama.

In the 1960s when the threat of the draft faded, many of the activists who carried signs into the streets became stock brokers and real estate agents. They may have fond memories of their trip to Woodstock, but the security and temptations of the American middle class dream waited on them in Mount Pleasant and elsewhere. Most people in 1975 didn't want to raise their children on a commune. They knew you shouldn't drop acid before a PTA meeting.

They grew up, put their love beads in a box and bought into a society that had something to sell them and a reliable mechanism for providing them with the means to purchase it.

Few of these young activists see themselves owning a home and having a family a decade from now. Many have seen their parents struggle to pay a mortgage on a home now worth less than what they paid for it. Some have dropped out because they're not certain college is worth the loans it will take to pay for it.

America makes a deal with every generation, but the establishment approaches this one without any bargaining chips in its bag. Businessmen will not be whispering "plastics" into their pierced ears because plastics come from China now. A better answer, and a truthful one, with an honest chance of working for those willing to contribute their dedication, labor and lives to the survival of our nation is required, now. You can Tweet it to #occupycharleston.

William Hamilton (www.wjhamilton.com) is an attorney who lives in I'On Village.