We're Better Than Alright

Check out this great post, The Kids Are Alright, over at the Campus Progress blog. Author Tim Fernholz writes in response to a recent American Prospect piece that wags its finger at today's young adults for being too complacent and co-opted because we're not enough alike the student activists of the '60s.

Read Fernholz's response, an excellent look at youth activism today, which posits that while we may be quieter than the protesters of the '60s, perhaps that's because we're working smarter and more strategically in winning social change. A few excerpts are below:

"Today’s youth activism is better than that of the ’60s. Too bad one young journalist doesn’t get it...

"Martin would like to see today’s young activists adopt the tactics of the 1960’s student radicals—protests, theatrics, and the like. Martin’s complaint is that young people today are too complacent, too safe, and too co-opted by "the man." We’re just not angry enough, she argues.

"But today’s young activists are angry—they’re just too busy attempting to create meaningful change to sit around waving signs. Martin, despite her travels around the country speaking to college students, doesn’t understand what a new generation of activists is doing to effect political change. In fact, she doesn’t even understand who today’s young activists are.

"But the fact is that young people are politically active on and off campus and more involved than many other demographic groups around the country. If you judge by their voting patterns, activism, organizing, and use of new technology, young people today are doing more now than in previous decades. Martin says we need to take advantage of our “raw power—the priceless power of being young and mad.” We already are young and mad, but we’re smart, too. Young progressives have moved beyond superficial displays of anger to spend more time changing the world than complaining about it. This isn’t to discount the strides our forebears made in the golden age of the student movement; it’s simply time to realize we don’t have to fight their battles all over again...

"Martin proves to be completely unaware of the effective student activism taking place today. For example, at my own college, Georgetown University, students have organized a successful living wage campaign that led to the unionization of sub-contracted workers and helped negotiate a raise for security guards. They also started STAND: A Student Anti-Genocide Coalition, an activist group that has chapters on 600 high school and college campuses. LGTBQLGBTQ students and their allies forced the administration to enact plans to hire a full-time resource coordinator—which is a big deal for a Catholic university. And this is just in the four years that I’ve been here.

"Around the country, organizations like Campus Progress fund issue campaigns that are conceived and organized by students on issues from stopping the death penalty and global warming to ending the war in Iraq. Some students have recently organized to support affirmative action. As Connery points out, other students at Harvard University and New York University have protested for a living wage and against bad immigration policies. And these are just the examples that make it into the national media. Despite Martin’s condescension, students who raise awareness of issues large and small on campuses across the country are engaging in meaningful activism, too. This might be part of Martin’s problem: Many community-centric activists aren’t involved in monolithic national movements. But these students aren’t voting on buttons—they’re passionate about working to change the world.

"And it’s not just activism. Thanks to the work of our baby-boomer forebears, young people have a place in politics today. They work on political campaigns, in think tanks, and in government. They seek to expose problems and advocate for change through journalism and blogging. They even run for office. They are part of groundbreaking campaigns like the Oregon Bus Project and Forward Montana. Our generation is also taking the lead in online organizing, from Facebook to MySpace. Do you think that the YouTube debate, arguably the best of the election cycle so far, would have happened without our generation’s influence?

"Martin says she would rather see young activists spend their time placing “viruses in campus administrators’ computers with pop-up windows demanding no more expansion into poor, local neighborhoods,” creating “mock draft cards [to send] home to their parents,” and organizing “a dance party—1 million youth strong—on the Washington lawn.” All of Martin’s suggestions have one thing in common, besides their sheer inanity (what, exactly, is “the Washington lawn?”): They would achieve nothing, except to further the stereotype that young people don’t understand politics. But then again, neither does Martin. As my generation works out how to make our own impact on the political system, we don’t need a ’60s wannabe telling us we’re not angry enough."

Read the full post, The Kids Are Alright, here.