A rash of articles, memes, and clichés declare “The young will save us!” They’ll “save the planet,” “start the revolution,” “eat the rich,” or whatever over-thirty-fives want done but don’t have the imagination, the guts, or the wisdom to do. Those who are self-righteous shake their jowls at “youth” and tell them they should be listening, voting, petitioning, praying, writing letters to their congressmen. (Letters? Really?) Do it the way we did it, some elders say.
The teenagers ask, “If your way worked, how did we come to this?”
It’s not their job to save us; we were supposed to protect them, leave them some kind of legacy or hope. Can they save us? I’m a photographer, not a prophet. I can’t say what’s going to happen. What I can do is see and record what I see. I see teens and their siblings fed up with police violence, white supremacy, oligarchy, climate catastrophe, Islamophobia, authoritarianism, and xenophobia. I see them angry. I see them questioning everything.
I see them attending memorials and holding candles for police executions of their brothers and friends.
I see them chalking names on sidewalks and poster boards, names of other kids killed in police violence. Black children, children with mental illness, poor children, trans children. Hashtag. Say their names. So many names.
I see them making protest art and crafting signs to hold in marches and rallies.
I see them becoming Antifascists, feeding the poor and sometimes bloc-ing up and refusing to be “nice” as fascism moves into the public sphere. They say the police and the fascists are in this together. They say there is no defense but themselves and each other; they’ll defend us from the police, they say.
I see them declaring themselves non-binary, two-spirit, Queer. They ask their siblings and elders to call them “they” instead of he or she, because they’ve fucking had it with the oppression of gender stereotypes.
I see them fighting the school board, defending teachers who lead them where they need to go but are threatened by authoritarian bureaucrats who follow the book so they don’t have to think.
I see them fighting the NRA.
I see them fighting Islamophobia. Close Guantanamo, they say.
I see them marching.
Sometimes they’re playful, as the young can be. Sometimes they get it wrong, because we all do. This shit’s complicated. If it were easy, we wouldn’t be in this mess.
They look at us in wonder and consternation. How did you let this happen?
They’re pissed off. They say they’re not gonna take it.
We said that too, when we were their age. What happened? Were we too busy to notice as our debt grew and the glaciers melted? Did we sing the song of capitulation? A few of us kept a torch burning for the possibility of some kind of humane civilization, some socialist democracy or anarchist utopia or spiritual recovery or something, but we’re going down. I haven’t even started my rant on military violence. The kids are right: the cis-het-patriarchal white racist greed-bloated capitalists have fucked this place up. Now what?
