Talking to Young People

I’ve been remiss about writing posts lately, mostly because of just being overwhelmed with life in general, but then yesterday I spoke to my daughter’s history class. The focus of the class is protest movements, and one of the instructors had read my blog and invited me to talk to her students about my experience with the women’s movement and protest. Now, that’s a pretty broad topic and I made notes, discarded them, made other notes, and mulled all of this over for the past several weeks. In the end, I decided to basically wing it using the teacher’s topic as a frame, but not a script. I started with a bit about my background and how being a child of the women’s movement affected how I got to be who and where I am today and ended with Brass Ovaries and the importance of political engagement.

I love young people, especially teenagers and college-age kids. They’re just fun. They’re at an age where anything seems possible, on the cusp of adulthood and testing their boundaries and often open to ideas and idealism that older folks have already dismissed as impractical, impossible, or just plain dumb. But the older I get, the more I worry that what I have to say to them will be greeted with boredom or indifference, because what if they think I’m irrelevant because of my age? Not yesterday.

The class was small and we sat at an oval table; I talked quite a bit and it took some time for any of them to ask questions, but eventually some of them did. The first question was from a young man who wondered if I look up to my parents. I had talked about patriarchal influences in my family, influences that were not conducive to women’s equality, and it seemed he wondered if I could reconcile that with my beliefs as an adult. One of the young women said she needed time to think hard to come up with a good question and eventually used it as a forum to reveal a potential gender harassment problem that the administration had not yet been made aware of, which was a very clever use of the opportunity. Most of them didn’t ask questions, but they seemed attentive and engaged. I loved, loved, loved talking to them, especially pointing out things going on in the U.S. right this very minute that affect them, and how they could engage to help bring about change.

We talked briefly about the election in Wisconsin that was going on even as we spoke, and the potential effects of the outcome. It was so exciting this morning to see not only that, in a heavily gerrymandered state, the underdog Democrat candidate for the Supreme Court not only won, but did it by a ten-point margin. It was even more exciting to read the statement from the Wisconsin Democratic Party crediting the hard work of boots-on-the-ground activists for the change, because it directly reinforced the message I had been trying to get across yesterday:

“On paper, this campaign may have lasted only a few months. But tonight’s victory is the result of years of unglamorous work by volunteers, activists, union members, and organizers across our state who knocked doors, made phone calls, chipped in, and never lost the faith that a better future was possible—even when hope seemed all but lost. Tonight is a testament to the power of never giving up. And it’s a testament to the whirlwind that the foes of democracy—in Wisconsin, and in America—can expect to reap. 

“While we may have won tonight, we know that the threat posed to our freedoms and our democracy by MAGA extremism continues. And that’s why we will never stop organizing. We will use this moment as a springboard into the long work ahead—to build a multiracial democracy in which all of us, no matter our gender or gender identity, our generation or the geography in which we live, has a voice, has dignity, and has the power that is supposed to be the birthright of all American citizens.” See WisDems: Statement congratulating Justice-elect Janet Protasiewicz.

Wisconsin, like the U.S., is not out of the woods yet. They now have a Republican supermajority in their Senate. At least they don’t control the state Supreme Court.

I feel like I got a second wind yesterday. And I got it by talking about Brass Ovaries and its mission to a group of young people. I highly recommend it.