the leadership these young people have shown on this, as it is very inspiring. It’s not just American kids either. Sixteen-year-old Greta Thunberg of Sweden has jolted audiences of adults around the world with her eloquent demands for climate action.
As part of the “Sunrise Movement,” young Americans, including high schoolers, are also leading the chorus for a Green New Deal, an idea that combines environmental concerns with social justice and a preference for those who have been most neglected in America’s race to be the most unequal rich nation on earth—including an understanding that not only have communities of color suffered, rural America has also long been neglected by our economy and politics. They have filled the offices of cautious Democrats like Nancy Pelosi and Dianne Feinstein, demanding to be taken seriously. In conservative Kentucky, they took on Senator McConnell.
Young Americans are putting the rest of us to shame by their leadership. In Minnesota, high school students even joined together to propose state Green New Deal legislation and have taken their proposals directly to newly-elected governor Tim Walz.
Of course, when one looks for the best example of how the young are leading the way, our attention is immediately called to the Green New Deal’s champion, the rather amazing Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the youngest member of Congress, who at 29 defeated a longtime Democratic leader (while she was tending bar in the evening!) and then overwhelmingly won a seat representing the New York boroughs of the Bronx and Queens.
Mature and savvy beyond her years, AOC, as she is often called, has wasted no time in proposing progressive legislation and attracting the anger of both internet trolls and the radical corporatists of the GOP (I refuse to call them “conservatives” since they wish no conserve nothing, including the essential biological systems on which all humans depend and will depend forever). Much of their response is downright silly—posting video of her dancing in college as if it would make her appear foolish, for example. Her response—a selfie of her dancing into her new Congressional office.