Over on the fantastic youth climate activism blog It's Getting Hot in Here, Natasha Chart reacts to this piece calling for more youth activism on climate change, which includes lines like "young people are not cynical or jaded like many adults. They believe they can truly make a difference – and they can." Chart is dead-on in her response to the piece, but she really could have been any of the many calls for young people to take up the (insert progressive cause here) charge, and echoed my thoughts exactly:
It's deeply frustrating to me to to hear someone with 20-30 years worth of professional experience, social networking, capital accumulation and political influence say that what they're really waiting on is for a bunch of people with none of those advantages to come do what they couldn't manage. In the same vein, I know that leading figures in many activist issue camps, whether elected officials or NGO staff, hope that young people, or bloggers, or ‘local' activists, really, anyone else, will get out and start rocking the boat so it doesn't have to be them. I've heard some version of this conversation too many times. So, yes it would definitely be nice if the young people manage to fix the climate problem, and we should try, as should everyone else.
As another young person, this is definitely something I've encountered as well, this expectation that it's up to us alone to take care of what previous generations haven't been able to. It doesn't seem to put any pressure on people who are already in positions of power to take action now. It also abdicates responsibility on the part of older folks to train, mentor, and assist younger people in the process, and to inspire this necessary activism in younger people.
It also often seems to come loaded with the assumption that young people don't care about these things in general. Many do; study after study has found college students volunteering and participating in their communities at record rates. But as a recent survey by the Center for Information & Research on Civic Learning & Engagement found, among the young people who reported volunteering in the past year, 52 percent said they did so to "help other people," while only 23 percent said they volunteered to help address a social or political problem.
Many young people see traditional political activism as separate from the issues they're concerned about personally, and don't necessarily identify with more traditional forms of political engagement. I'd venture that this is probably at least in part because they're pretty cynical about traditional politics because of previous generations that have, as Chart points out, either given up or compromised to the point of failure. And even many of those who have had success and longevity have often failed to incorporate younger people in meaningful ways. So while it would be great if all of us young folks could fix all our problems, making it incumbent upon us alone is clearly a cop out.
--Kate Sheppard