November 21, 2018
In no particular order I am going to applaud movements carried by young people this year. Youth has always had a major role in fostering societal change – think the Civil Rights Movement, the Vietnam Protests, the Arab Spring, Tiananmen Square. Movements that try to tackle the big issues of our time, from climate catastrophe, environmental destruction to the danger from the ubiquity of automatic and other weapons are carried by American youth here and now as well.
There is Sunrise – a movement to stop climate change. These are kids, basically, pursuing a #greennewdeal.
https://www.sunrisemovement.org/who-we-are/
Then there are the Parkland survivors, who just yesterday received the International Kids’ Peace Award presented by Bishop Desmond Tutu for their organizing the March for our Lives to prevent further gun violence. Independent of how effective they are in fighting gun producers and sellers, their efforts to organize the youth vote have been phenomenally successful. Youth vote in early voting alone surge by 188% over the 2014 midterms.
Then there are the many activists (not all of them young, as it turns out) who defend our environment against industrial assault, with leadership from many indigenous people, and with courageous lawyers by their side. I am thinking, as just on example, of the Minnesota Valve turners, a group of people willing to go to prison in order to protest pipelines and all the threats that resource extraction entail for our climate.
https://www.wired.com/story/monkeywrenching-vandals-are-reinventing-climate-activism/
Above is a link to an article that outlines what people have tried to do and what defenses they are trying to use in court regarding their actions: among them the necessity defense, which states that when all legal and political means are exhausted it might be necessary to engage in non-violent illegal action to prevent irreversible harm.
Below is the trailer, close to my heart, to a documentary in the making – Necessity – that follows some of these activists and the folks from the Climate Defense Project who provide legal support.
To learn more about the film and how it can be supported you can go to the website.
https://www.necessitythemovie.com
Photographs shown today were taken at various industrial sites and at PSU 2 weeks back when Kelsey Skaggs, mentioned in the article above, gave a talk about the CDP (I did a bit of production photography for the documentary.)
Much gratitude, then, for all the folks out there in the front lines, taking enormous risks and exposing themselves to attacks in order to do what’s right. They instill a sense of hope, plain and simple, which is a lot after what 2018 has provided so far….
