In 2020, voters under 30 helped Joe Biden defeat Donald Trump for the presidency. Will they be a significant influence this November? As Buckminster Fuller put it, it apparently depends on whether they decide to be the architects of the future or its victims.
Pollsters have come up with contradictory results about the morale of young Americans. Earlier this year, the Harvard Kennedy School surveyed more than 2,000 Americans between the ages of 18 and 29 and found that more than half intend to vote in the presidential election. The poll detected “strong levels of engagement and interest in voting.”
A student who helped conduct the poll reported that “young Americans are more ready than ever to engage with (democratic) institutions to push for the change we want to see in the world.”
On the other hand, researchers at the University of California Berkeley reported in June that “many young voters appear to share a belief that fractured, dysfunctional government systems are incapable of addressing critical challenges that fall heavily on their generations. A sense of fatalism extends across the right, center, and left.”
“As a group,” the summary reads, “those tens of millions of young Americans face risks that older generations could scarcely imagine: extreme economic inequality, climate change and warp-speed technological change that is shaking political and economic stability in the U.S. and much of the world.”
Both polls were taken before Kamala Harris had become the Democrats’ presidential nominee. Roll Call says that Harris seems to be energizing young voters. Let’s hope so — today’s challenges are daunting, even existential, but they are solvable.
Every generation inherits some of its parents’ sins. However, young Americans of the past have a good record of rising to the challenge.
They prevailed in World War II, then came home and built the modern American economy. Baby boomers were barely out of high school when they challenged the Vietnam war, uncontrolled pollution, ugly racism and sex discrimination.
They sustained the anti-war movement for nearly 20 years before the Vietnam conflict ended in 1973. The movement became the “war at home.” Before it ended, four students were shot to death by National Guardsmen at Kent State University, and a researcher was killed when antiwar activists bombed a building at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Meantime, in Vietnam, nearly 58,200 American soldiers were killed in action or captivity or went missing and were assumed dead. Their average age was 22. In addition, Vietnam lost 2 million civilians and 1.1 million soldiers on both sides.
Young people were the backbone of the modern Civil Rights Movement in the 1950s and 1960s. In 1960, four Black students staged a sit-in at a whites-only Woolworth’s lunch counter in North Carolina. Within days, the protest grew to 300 students and spread to businesses in college towns across America.
Young Black and white activists rode buses through southern states to challenge segregation laws, participated in marches, and organized protests and voter registration drives.
In his book about the movement, Rufus Burrow Jr. recounts, “The Birmingham Children’s Crusade of 1963 saw participants as young as four being beaten by police, arrested, and held in jail for days at a time. Sit-ins, both planned and spontaneous, carried out by Atlanta University Center students worked to flood county jails, overwhelm the system, and eventually desegregate Atlanta’s lunch counters.”
Young people “demonstrated a willingness to take risks and displayed a level of urgency that their older counterparts did not always achieve,” Burrow wrote, “Across the Southeast, young people embodying the philosophy of nonviolence carried out peaceful and effective protests that led to lasting legislative change.”
Historians say it’s difficult to determine how many children and young adults died in the civil rights movement, but its martyrs included four young girls killed in 1963 in an Alabama church bombing; three young activists in Mississippi murdered by the Ku Klux Klan in 1964; and three more killed by police during student demonstrations. In 1963, a 13-year-old boy was shot and killed by white teenagers after they left a segregationist rally in Alabama.
Young people were also the driving force behind the modern environmental movement in the 1960s and 1970s. Antiwar teach-ins on college campuses became the model for Earth Day in 1970, whose 20 million participants made it politically safe for overwhelming majorities in Congress to pass nearly two dozen landmark environmental laws. The Clean Air Act alone prevented 435,000 premature deaths between 1970 and 2020 and improved the health of countless Americans.
Today, many millennials and Generation Z’ers continue that tradition in the fight against greenhouse gas emissions. In 2021, the Pew Research Center found high levels of engagement with the issue compared to older Americans. Following the model established 40 years ago against apartheid in South Africa, college students have pressured institutions with global assets of more than $40 trillion to divest from fossil fuels.
However, the vote remains the most potent weapon for change. Young Americans should use it to remove roadblocks like the 123 climate deniers in Congress, the politically tainted Supreme Court, and the far right’s campaign to dismantle democracy.
The past teaches that some progress occurs at lightning speed while other movements require incredible persistence. Problems like racism require constant vigilance to prevent backsliding. And as we see today, necessary changes often begin with one generation and must be finished by the next.
There is hope today despite what may seem like unsolvable problems. Environmental stewardship, social justice and democracy have the advantage of moral high ground. In addition, young Americans are blessed with brilliant and promising leaders. One of them, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), got it right when she said, “I just hope that more people will ignore the fatalism of the argument that we are beyond repair. We are not beyond repair. We are never beyond repair.”
William S. Becker is a former regional director at the U.S. Department of Energy and author of several books on climate change and national disaster policies, including the “100-Day Action Plan to Save the Planet,” published by St. Martin’s Griffin, and “The Creeks Will Rise: People Co-Existing with Floods,” published by the Chicago Review Press.
