March/April 2006 Featured Story Young People Driving the Justice Bus By Elizabeth Aguilera An army of young people dressed in colorful Halloween costumes knocks on doors and asks “Trick or Vote?” in the largest door-to-door voter campaign in Oregon’s history. A high school environmental club challenges its city council in a small Utah town to step up and join a consortium of mayors working to limit global warming pollution. A youth-led campaign grows to oppose the military’s practice of recruiting students from poor communities of color. Around the nation and abroad, young people are speaking loudly about their beliefs through activism, organization, and the political process. Today’s young people, between 15 and 30, are not that different from those who marched during the Civil Rights movement or protested against Vietnam. They fight inequality, racism, injustice, and oppression by focusing on the environment, prison issues and police brutality, education, and world peace. They represent diversity in race, sexual orientation, and geography, and the lines of those communities are blurred as they represent themselves and each other. What is significantly different is the sophistication of this generation raised on technology: they create listservs, develop Web sites, and use other emerging new media to weave a tapestry of activists who can be mobilized at a moment’s notice. And they are stirring. The 2004 election showed they are on the move – it was just the second time the youth vote increased since 18-year-olds were allowed to vote in 1971. Equally telling, 40.2% of youth volunteer, 6% of them for a political organization, according to a 2004 report by the Center for Information & Research on Civic Learning & Engagement (CIRCLE). “It has to do with technology,” said Adrienne Maree Brown, of the League of Young Voters. “We are in a space now where we can lay the groundwork for ourselves where young people can learn to speak for ourselves and communicate for ourselves.” There are times in a nation’s history when young people cannot afford not to get involved. This is one of those times, young people say. “When circumstances that your community faces mean you can’t afford to stay separated, you have to be involved so everyone can be more successful,” said Brown, 27.
The young are active because they deeply believe and know a different world is possible, he said. Boudin is co-editor of Letters from Young Activists (see review, p. 28). His parents were incarcerated for life when he was 14 months old for their involvement in a botched robbery that left three people dead. They were members of a 1970s radical group, the Weathermen. The 25-year-old’s activism, particularly around police and jail issues, derives from his own family history, but he is also deeply influenced, like other young people, by the times. “Our generation’s challenges are rooted in the fact that the unprecedented advances in technology and the concentration of power in this day and age mean that we face the very real possibility that humans will make the earth uninhabitable within our lifetime,” he said. Technology today has empowered young people to build local, national, and global resistance and support. That power was on display during the international day of protest against the war in Iraq on February 15, 2003, when nearly 15 million people worldwide participated in protests. “Our generation must figure out how to channel that righteous rage towards constructive social and political change,” said Boudin. This change will happen nonviolently, if the majority has its way. The Ruckus Society, founded in 1995, is a national initiative driven by young activists to provide justice organizers with tools and training for activism. It has achieved notoriety for dramatic actions – like hanging massive banners off of buildings and organizing protests during World Trade Organization meetings. But its efforts are steeped in the philosophy and practice of nonviolence. Its guiding principle, according to literature, is to “help people learn the skills they need to practice nonviolent direct action safely and effectively.” It’s a complicated challenge, observed Boudin. “I think that violence should always be the last option. But we must also recognize that almost all political change in history has been accompanied by some violence.” He noted that Gandhi led India to independence in the wake of World War II, and Dr. King fought for civil rights under the threat of race riots. The strategies for social change reflect the political context, and the violent means of governments like the United States can dictate the situation. “We must find ways to challenge that systemic violence without ourselves becoming what we are fighting against.” Today’s young activists are striving to make this change happen by combining street activism with political influence in a new and different way. In Oregon, more than 300 young activists gathered on Mt. Hood in January for the “Rebooting Democracy” conference hosted by the Bus Project. “Often it’s decided behind closed doors what policy is going to be supported with significant backing at the state level,” said Garrett Downen, the project’s director of operations. “What we wanted to do was leverage volunteer power and mobilize grassroots efforts to make it so that young Joe Average could help choose whether they want to tackle health care or energy policy this year.” The Bus Project, founded in 2001, is a voter mobilization and leadership incubator focused on person-based politics, said Downen, 26. Bus volunteers are united by the “Six E’s”: environment, education, election reform, economic fairness, equal rights and “’ealthcare.” “One of the concerns was that people were not engaged in state politics,” Downen said. “What do you do to get people on that bus metaphorically?” It isn’t just metaphorical. The group owns a big red bus for volunteers to pile into for trips – for knocking on doors and hosting rallies in small towns and cities in an effort to bridge the urban and rural divide. Nine out of ten senate candidates the group supported won office. “We helped turn the state senate from not at all forward-thinking to a progressive majority,” Downen said. They do it through working the Bus and working the street. More than 800 volunteers carried out the Halloween stunt, the largest canvass in the state’s history. On the late October night that most people expect a knock on the door, Downen dressed as if he were on safari. Downen grew up in Alexandria, Egypt, where his father worked for the U.S. government. When he returned to the States he was distressed at the lack of global awareness. “I’ve always been interested in international issues and America’s place in the world; I’m concerned with energy usage and the environment,” said Downen, who started as a Bus volunteer before joining the staff. “That is what got me involved in making a difference and making sure we still had a healthy planet when I was done living.” The natural environment and the urban environment are both serious issues with young people, said Kenyon Farrow, 31. He grew up watching his mother perform her own style of activism. She fought for families living in housing projects when they were facing eviction, took in women to help them escape abusive situations, and housed runaway kids. As a high-schooler, Farrow organized a campaign to implement a world history requirement in the curriculum at the Hawkin School in greater Cleveland. He has continued his activism by focusing on lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender issues, particularly in the black community, and joining protests by black and Latino activists against military recruitment (or the “poverty draft,” as the military’s tactics of heavy recruiting among poor kids of color are known in critical circles). Recently, Farrow – a co-editor of Letters from Young Activists – has been working with the New York State Black Gay Network, a nonprofit that focuses on violence and homophobia. “We are seeing a return to young people in their localities getting involved in what the issues are around them,” said Farrow. Working the political process is one way young people have begun to let their voices be heard. This is their world and they want to protect it, said Utah high school senior Will Munger, 18, president of the Logan Environmental Action Force (LEAF). The members of LEAF asked the Logan City Council to support anti-global warming resolutions by endorsing the U.S. Mayors Climate Protection Agreement. Last year, ten mayors challenged their colleagues across the nation to take local action to reduce global warming pollution. By early December, 194 mayors had accepted the challenge. The mayors’ effort came after 141 countries had adopted the Kyoto Protocol. LEAF is still working to add its city to the list. Logan is in Cache Valley, where hazardous emissions are trapped by the topography and linger in the city’s air. “We want them to be conscious of global warming when making decisions for the city,” said Munger. “It’s something we are conscious of all the time.” Like many young activists, Munger, who was arrested when he participated in a protest at the beginning of the war, sees environmental issues as connected to human rights. He is also an avid outdoorsman and sees firsthand how the environment is abused. “It’s critical that we address these issues in a way that is practical but also radical,” said Munger, who plans to study environmental law.
Nationally, the League of Young Voters is working to corral the enthusiasm and energy of young people to vote, push ballot initiatives, and eventually run for office. The national organization has more than a dozen groups across the nation working on statewide issues. The chapters create local voter guides and provide education about ballot issues. “The group came into being because we were a bunch of young people that didn’t really believe in voting or voter organizing as the be-all, end-all of what we were trying to do,” said Brown. “But we realize it’s a tool, and as people who are fed up with how the country has been run and the whole way things have been going, it came out of those frustrations.” The unofficial name of the organization – “The League of Pissed-Off Voters” – is used in the field to get the point across that young voters are angry. “It’s the idea that people should be angry about how things are going and we should be using all the tools at our disposal, and that has to include voting,” said Brown. But this anger is often balanced by a sense of spirituality, albeit one that some young activists may not recognize. Brown argues that the Left, which centers the political reality of many young progressives, operates from a basis of faith. “It is a critical faith, because it looks at where we are and says we could be better humans, better to each other, and believes that another world – a heaven of sorts, in which justice and truth and loyalty guide us – is possible. The movement for social justice is, at its heart, a movement of the spirit.” Guided by whatever force moves them, young people today have claimed the traditional tools of activism, such as marches and petitions, sit-ins and walk-outs, and added an arsenal of technological weapons, including electronic networking, outreach, and organizing. And now they are pushing political involvement to make their point. As Brown summarized, “The idea of being represented by people who don’t care about you at all! You have to make a crucial decision: do you make them care about you, or do you take the power away from them so it doesn’t matter if they care about you or not?” Take heart: young people are choosing to accept the challenge and claim their power.
Elizabeth Aguilera, a native of Southern California, covers urban affairs for The Denver Post. She has reported from Cuba and Mexico, and most recently wrote about the devastation of Hurricane Katrina. She’s also written for the Orange County Register and the Long Beach Press-Telegram.
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Young activists call themselves “progressives” – one family fighting for the future of the environment, human rights, and a multicultural society. “Young people get active because the stakes are high for our generation,” said activist Chesa Boudin, a Rhodes scholar. “Our future is at stake and we are witnessing our government actively undermine our future. We are called to action by the oppression and the injustice we see all around us.”
Michael Sessions, 18, took it one step further and ran for mayor of his small Michigan town, Hillsdale. The high school senior was not old enough to get on the ballot by the deadline but he still took the seat through a write-in campaign in November, 2005. “I decided I needed to do something and have some changes,” he said. “I was never too happy to look and see that no one else was running.” 