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Here's a truth (or do I mean a truism?): you're only young once. I say that, of course, as I head for my 80th year on this planet. But as TomDispatch regular and co-chair of the Poor People's Campaign Liz Theoharis points out today, there's something about being young in an embattled world that can lead you to act in ways surprising even to yourself. I still remember how, in the years of my youth, in the midst of a terrible war my country was fighting thousands of miles away in Vietnam, I found myself, like so many other young Americans in and out of uniform, protesting in a way that, had I asked my even younger self, I would never have imagined possible.
Some 55 years later, I'm still surprised that, in those years when I found myself regularly demanding that my country stop killing Vietnamese, I also had the nerve to turn in my draft card, turn down a scholarship from the National Defense Foreign Language Fellowship, and do so much else that I undoubtedly wouldn't have the nerve to do today. I still have the letter I wrote to that fellowship, refusing the scholarship. It began: "On the morning of April 3, at the Boston Common, I turned in my draft card. I felt this to be a reply to three different types of 'channeling' which I saw as affecting my own life. First of all, it was a reply to General Hershey's statement [Army general Lewis Blaine Hershey, then director of the Selective Service System] that manpower channeling 'is the American or indirect way of achieving what is done by direction in foreign countries where choice is not permitted.' I dissociated myself from the draft system which was flagrantly attempting to make me live a life without freedom.
"But I and my friends had been 'channeled' long before General Hershey ever got to us. We had been taught for years, implicitly and explicitly, that we had no choice but to live as we were living if we were to avoid an unthinkable variety of horrors: that we should not think for ourselves, sign any statements, speak as we believed, or appear conspicuous to others. My reply on April 3rd, then, was to choose what I felt to be a sane, moral, integral, and available alternative to the life I had been living. Finally, I entered into resistance against an American government which was, with the help of the men provided by the draft, attempting the most serious type of 'channeling' outside our own country."
I was referring, of course, to what my government was then doing all too brutally in Vietnam. And though I wrote on almost endlessly explaining myself, you get the idea. It's a small reminder -- to me at least -- that, when you're young and you see worlds that shouldn't be, you may act in ways that those so much older wouldn't. Today, quoting an author and a favorite from my own past, Howard Zinn, Theoharis explores just how such youthful responses can indeed change our world for the better. Tom
Change Is Coming Soon
The Powerful and Visionary Leadership of Young Activists Is Crucial in These Times
"All Americans owe them a debt for -- if nothing else -- releasing the idealism locked so long inside a nation that has not recently tasted the drama of a social upheaval. And for making us look on the young people of the country with a new respect." That's how Howard Zinn opened his book The New Abolitionists about the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee of the 1960s. Zinn pointed out a truth from the Black freedom struggles of that era and earlier: that young people were often labeled aloof and apathetic, apolitical and uncommitted -- until suddenly they were at the very forefront of justice struggles for themselves and for the larger society. Connected to that truth is the reality that, in the history of social-change movements in the United States and globally, young people almost invariably find themselves in the lead.
I remember first reading The New Abolitionists in the 1990s when I was a college student and activist. I had grown weary of hearing older people complain about the inactivity of my generation, decrying why we weren't more involved in the social issues of the day. Of course, even then, such critiques came in the face of mass protests, often led by the young, against the first Iraq war (launched by President George H.W. Bush), the Republican Contract With America, and the right-wing "family values" movement. Such assertions about the apathy of youth were proffered even as young people were waging fights for marriage equality, the protection of abortion, and pushing back against the attack on immigrants, as well as holding mass marches like the Battle for Seattle at the World Trade Organization meeting as well as protests at the Republican National Convention of 2000, and so much more.
Another quote from Zinn remains similarly etched in my mind. "Theirs," he wrote, "was the silent generation until they spoke, the complacent generation until they marched and sang, the money-seeking generation until they gave it up for" the fight for justice in the dank and dangerous hamlets of the Black Belt."
And if it was true that, in the 1990s and 2000s, young people were so much less complacent than was recognized at the time, it's even truer (to the nth degree!) in the case of the Millennials and Gen Z today. Younger generations are out there leading the way toward justice in a fashion that they seldom get credit for.
Don't Look Up
Let me suggest, as a start, that we simply chuck out the sort of generalizations about Millennials and Gen Z that pepper the media today: that those younger generations spend too much money on avocado toast and Starbucks when they should be buying real estate or paying down their student loans. Accused of doing everything through social media, it's an under-recognized and unappreciated reality of this century that young people have been showing up in a remarkable fashion, leading the way in on-the-ground movements to ensure that Black lives matter, dealing vividly with the onrushing horror of climate change, as well as continued conflict and war, not to speak of defending economic justice and living wages, abortion access, LGBTQ rights, and more.
Take, for instance, the greatest social upheaval of the past five years: the uprising that followed the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, with #BlackLivesMatter protests being staged in staggering numbers of communities, many of which had never hosted such an action before. Those marches and rallies, led mainly by teenagers and young adults, may have been the broadest wave of protests in American history.
When it comes to the environmental movement, young people have been organizing campaigns for climate justice, calling for a #GreenNewDeal and #climatedefiance from Cop City to the March to End Fossil Fuels to a hunger strike in front of the White House. At the same time, they have been bird-dogging politicians on both sides of the aisle with an urgency and militancy not previously associated with climate change. Meanwhile, a surge of unionization drives, whether at Walmart, Starbucks, Amazon, or Dollar General, has largely been led by young low-wage workers of color and has increased appreciation for and recognition of workers' rights and labor unions to a level not seen in decades. Add to that the eviction moratoriums, mutual-aid provisions, and student-debt strikes of the pandemic years, which gained ground no one had thought possible even months earlier.
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