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Gun control, climate: a new US generation takes to the barricades
NEW YORK, March 31, 2019 (BSS/AFP) – In the United States, David Hogg is a
leading campaigner for gun control, while in Europe, Greta Thunberg fights to
defend the climate.
They may only be teenagers, but both have drawn worldwide followings for
their clear messages and fierce commitment — symbols of a generation of
surprising militancy.
Hogg, who is 18, is a leader of the March for Our Lives movement, launched
by students from his high school in Parkland, Florida, where a heavily armed
gunman massacred 17 people on February 14, 2018.
The movement, pushing for stricter gun control legislation, has mobilized
hundreds of thousands of young Americans.
Thunberg, a pig-tailed Swedish student who looks younger even than her 16
years, has become the European face of the fight against global warming,
inspiring huge crowds of young protesters to take to the streets, including
in Germany, which had not seen such massive turnouts since the heady days of
reunification.
Thunberg has come far from the days when she mounted a brave but lonely
protest standing on the steps of the Swedish parliament. She is now mentioned
as a possible Nobel Peace Prize winner for 2019.
Were she to win that lofty award, Thunberg would be the youngest laureate
ever, younger even than Pakistani schoolgirl Malala Yousafzai, who at 17 won
the 2014 Nobel for her fight — even after being shot by a Taliban gunman —
for education rights for girls and women.
– Raising their voices –
Some members of this new generation are even more precocious. Consider
American schoolgirl Alice Paul Tapper, who was only 10 in 2017 when she
started her “Raise Your Hand” campaign to encourage girls not to let
themselves be intimidated. The movement caught fire on social media, boosted
by help from her Girl Scout troop and also by the celebrity of her father,
CNN newsman Jake Tapper.
Her new book “Raise Your Hand,” published this week, briefly ranked 12th
on Amazon’s list of “hot new releases.”
According to several experts, these examples illustrate a rise in youthful
involvement not seen in years — akin, some say, to the activism seen during
the US civil rights protests of the 1960s.
If youth has always been synonymous with protests, the trend seemed to
have gone latent for years. “We went through a generation or almost two when
we were not seeing a lot of activism,” said Elizabeth Matto, a Rutgers
University specialist in youthful political participation. “The teenagers we
are calling Generation Z now,” she said, are showing a “real inclination to
engage in expressing their political voice.”
“They are starting to recognize what a force they are to be reckoned
with… a generation that wants to make things better and who does not really
see their age as a barrier.”
As proof she cited the involvement of Americans aged 18 to 29 in last
November’s US congressional election: some 31 percent of them voted, the
highest rate in 25 years, according to Tufts University’s Center for
Information and Research on Civic Learning & Engagement (CIRCLE).
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More educated than older Americans, and having grown up with — and become
completely fluent in — the ways of social media, this generation knows how
to organize and draw attention, said Sam Abrams, a political science
professor at Sarah Lawrence College in New York.
These young militants can quickly assemble videos that are “almost movie-
quality stuff,” said Abrams, who is 39. “This generation knows how to do that
and convey these stories really effectively.”
Without social media, says Hogg — who has 950,000 Twitter followers —
the Parkland students could still have organized their protests “but not
nearly to the scale that we did.” – No guarantees of change –
But even if social media make it far easier to attract attention or draw
followers, they offer no guarantee that this young generation can effect real
change, Abrams emphasized.
“The big question always is: can they sustain a movement?”
“Social change,” he added, “it is slow, it takes years.”
With college students coming and going — and graduating — Abrams says he
has seen many student movements burst onto the scene, and then lose steam and
fade away.
Nineteen-year-old Zanagee Artis, who last year co-founded the Zero Hour
coalition for climate and environmental justice, admits that after months of
intensive activism, he shed most of his leadership responsibilities after
starting his studies in political science and the environment at Brown
University.
“Older youths like me,” he told AFP, “we are going to be more busy and
will have less time” for activism.
“But I don’t have any doubt that Zero Hour will be able to continue,” he
said. “With the rise of social media, we are able to connect with a lot more
youths than before.”
David Hogg said that after taking a “gap year” to travel across the
country, he is ready to ease off on the gas as he heads to Harvard
University.
“I’ll be less involved, but we’ll be just as effective,” he said. “There
are many other people involved, and we have a movement that’s growing
stronger every day.”
Hogg said he is quite aware that change on a subject as sensitive as US
gun control could take years.
“It might take a while,” he said. “It might take kids running for Congress
who are not old enough yet.”
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