The Power of Hope and the Promise of the Parkland Generation

 Ever since David Hogg, Emma Gonzales, and other high school student leaders began organizing against gun violence when their Florida school experienced a massacre in 2018 that killed 17 people and injured 17 more, I’ve clung to the belief that if we could get to the Parkland generation as political leaders, we just might save our country. I believe that now more than ever.

David Hogg is 23 now and a student at Harvard. It should come as no surprise that he has reached a new level of political advocacy. Working with Kevin Lata, Rep. Maxwell Frost’s (D-FL) campaign manager in 2022, the two activists have launched a new organization that seeks to put more young people in elected office at the state level and in Congress.

Leaders We Deserve has a PAC to coordinate with selected campaigns and a super PAC to raise funds for those campaigns. The organization has a diverse advisory group that includes Reps. Root, Swalwell (D-Calif.), Justin Jones (D-TN) and Lauren Underwood (D-Ill.). It plans to hire staff going forward.

“A big part of this,” Lata told NBC’s Meet the Press, “is electing young people that have the values of our generation [which] understands the anxiety of not knowing if you’re going to be able to survive math class.”

Hogg, who cofounded March for Our Lives, put it this way to CBS: “There are so many charismatic, brilliant young people that have come from March for Our Lives, and have now started running for office, like Maxwell, and there’s so many more that I think can come. That’s why I’m doing this, it’s to help build that pathway.”

Both Hogg and Lata take a long view of the work they have begun.  They know it’s more than an ideology-driven effort. It requires organizational skills, political savvy, resources, an experienced staff and viable candidates. That’s why they are starting with a plan that includes raising money, connecting 15 to 30 candidates at the state level to media, and supporting them in the “mechanics of a campaign.” Their goal is to help young people gain and remain in elected office with a view to running for higher office when the time is right. They are starting in states like Texas, Florida, Georgia, and North Carolina. As Hogg told NBC, the aim is to “make inroads and start building the bench now.”

They have notable role models to look to as their work progresses. Maxwell Frost was the first Gen Z member of Congress and he’s made a name for himself as he serves on the Committee on Oversight and Accountability, asking astute questions while standing up to Republican extremists who work hard to politicize committee work in Congress. He also represents a progressive view unfamiliar to many in Congress who are out of touch with youth, Black, and Latino constituents.

It's worth noting that Frost, a former organizer, activist, and special needs teacher, was inspired to activism when he was 15 years old because of the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School. He also witnessed and survived gun violence himself in Orlando in 2016.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) is another example of effective leadership from younger members in Congress. She worked in the 2016 presidential election as a volunteer organizer for Sen. Bernie Sanders (D-VT.) Inspired by demonstrations led by indigenous communities in South Dakota who opposed a new pipeline, she joined them, resolving after that experience to commit to public service. Shortly afterwards, she launched her first campaign for Congress, and won against a long-time incumbent.

She became the youngest woman and youngest Latina to serve in Congress in 2019 and she quickly got to work. During her first term she introduced 23 pieces of legislation, one of which was the Green New Deal resolution, which envisioned a 10-year plan inspired by FDR’s New Deal. It was designed to open work opportunities in construction and restoring infrastructure, reduce air and water pollution, and fight economic, social, racial and climate crises. She was also recognized for her skill as a questioner in committee hearings, effectively standing up to Big Pharma, defense contractors, and other power players.

Leaders like Frost and Ocasio-Cortez reveal the possibilities inherent in the purpose of Leaders We Deserve. Along with Hogg et al. they offer an important and timely new vision of effective leadership at a time when we are worried about the aging of some current, long-time legislators and leaders, many of whom have no real connection to or understanding of their constituencies or other Americans.   

According to a Tufts University study an estimated 8.3 million newly eligible voters emerged in the 2022 midterm elections, including White, Latino, Asian, Native American, and Black youth. In the current Congress, 52 members of the House are Millennials, aged 27 to 42, up from 31 in the last Congress. They represent 10 percent of all current voting House members and are divided equally between Democrats and  Republicans. In next year’s election those numbers are likely to grow.

David Hogg sees this as “a second step for our generation and the people in power. We’re not just voting, we’re also running.”

Activist Ariana Jasmine.agrees. “Young people are the future. They are showing that they are fed up, and they are showing up even if they aren’t old enough to vote. They understand that the direction we’re going in is completely unsustainable.”

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The Normalization of Fascism

When my siblings and I were growing up and we did something untoward that got us into trouble my mother would say, “Let that be a lesson to you!” I’ve remembered that line whenever someone thinks I’m over-reacting when I say the Trump administration has opened the way to a functioning autocracy rapidly morphing into full-blown fascism.

I think about the truism that “history is prologue.  We should be taking that truth more seriously.

A chilling December article in The Guardian by Jason Stanley revealed why. “America is now in fascism’s legal phase,” Stanley posits.

His article begins with a 1995 quote by the late Toni Morrison. “Let us be reminded,” the writer said, “that before there is a final solution, there must be a first solution, a second one, even a third. The move toward a final solution is not a jump. It takes one step, then another, then another.”

Morrison recognized the connection between racism, anti-Semitism and fascist movements propagated by and aligned with oligarchs, as Stanley does. His compelling article lays out the various ways in which Donald Trump led us to the tipping point “where rhetoric becomes policy.”

Among the issues Stanley discusses are the takeover of our courts by Trump appointees, right wing attempts at voter suppression, increasing corporate influence, the crackdown on reproductive rights and enforced gender roles, Jim Crow laws and controlled school curricula, increased political and police violence, mass incarceration particularly among blacks, threatening vigilante groups, and punitive actions towards journalists and non-loyalists. It’s a gobsmacking portrait of where we are now as a country on the brink.

This isn’t the first time America has had to confront insurrection and political violence, but it is a time to consider history, and to remember that this isn’t America’s first fascist threat.

The lessons of history include a close look at all dictatorships. In this moment, it is urgent that we consider Hitler’s rise to power. As Stanley and others make clear, Hitler and his minions were adept at using propaganda and lies to create a narrative that led to his election, and his subsequent hideous policies. Citing “the big lie” that the last election was stolen, Stanley notes that “we have begun to restructure institutions, notable electoral infrastructure and law” and that “the media’s normalization of these processes encourages silence at all costs.’

German fascism didn’t arise overnight. Germany’s National Socialist Party began small, but extremely right wing and anti-democratic, according to historians. Masked in nationalist rhetoric, its agenda resonated with people who felt worried and humiliated. They welcomed scapegoats. Stanley put it this way: “The central message of Nazi politics was to demonize a set of constructed enemies, an unholy alliance of communists and Jews.” Nazi leaders “recognized that the language of family, faith, morality, and homeland could be used to justify especially brutal violence against an enemy represented as being opposed to all these things.”

Sound familiar? We’ve already heard talk of book burning, spying on each other, and Jews altering their behavior as precautionary measures. We’ve witnessed racist violence, attacks on peaceful protesters, and acts of white supremacy grounded in the claim that we are a Christian nation. Congress has its share of pro-autocracy politicians, and our local and state governments have all been infiltrated. Vigilante groups prowl the streets, guns and hate placards waving.

What more do we need to wake up?

This is not the first fascist threat to American democracy but the pro-Nazi movement of the 1930s and early 1940s was the most frightening to date. Characterized by a 1939 event at Madison Square Garden, a rally of 22,000 members of the German party known as the Bund, saluted large banners in Nazi fashion. The banners showed George Washington surrounded by swastikas.  

The movement included summer camps for children, billed as family friendly venues, where Nazi indoctrination took place.  At one of them in New York state an annual German Day festival attracted 40,000 people. Germany’s brown-shirted camp kids later became SS thugs. 

The American Nazi movement, with which Charles Lindbergh sympathized, came to an end only after the 1939 invasion of Poland by Hitler, followed by the Bund being outlawed in 1941. All of this is captured in Philip Roth’s semi-autobiographical novel The Plot Against America.

Nevertheless, America has continued to witness Nazi inspired acts. In 1978 a rally in Skokie, Illinois repeated the language of the Third Reich. Donald Trump coopted a German slogan in “America First” as support for anti-immigration sentiments. And now white supremacist rhetoric is being spewed as it was in Charlottesville in 2017. A year ago, a massive crowd of insurrectionists stormed the Capital wearing T-shirts embossed “Camp Auschwitz.”  

In her speech at Howard University, Toni Morrison asserted that fascism relies upon media to convey an illusion of power to its followers.  Now, finally, the media is listening to booming alarm bells and the military is preparing for an all-out coup which could happen in 2024 if not before.

It’s time now to ask for whom the alarm bells toll. As Ernest Hemingway knew, it tolls for all of us.

What Do We Mean When We Talk About Human Rights?

What Do We Mean When We Talk About Human Rights?

“Human Rights.” It’s a term tossed around all too easily, a hollow piece of rhetoric practiced in the breach, a faux cliché uttered in fragile times. It’s a mantra lacking moral conviction and humane behavior, a way to cover the shame of failed promises, a salve without resolve spread by self-righteous, glib politicians at podiums and to the media. It’s a hollow claim that enables us to believe we are an “exceptional” country. It’s a lie in the face of multiple human tragedies in which we are complicit. These are tragedies that we fuel, facilitate, ignore, without asking ourselves how committed we are as a nation to the imperative of human rights.

I come to this awareness when I ask how it is that we condemn Russia’s or China’s or Myanmar’s human rights abuses against their people while continuing to sanction Israel’s human rights abuses against Palestinian people among them.

I come to it when I think about how we abandoned the people of Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia who helped us during that dreadful war, and then tried to do the same thing to the Afghan people who worked at the American Embassy or for American contractors and the American military, lessened in its shameful practice, but not eliminated only because of public outcries.

I came to it when we were silent about what Saudi Arabia has done in Yemen, and in its embassy in Turkey, and when our silence did not help end the atrocities in Syria. Of course, I understand the politics of non-action no matter where it occurs, but when politics trumps humanity I shudder.

I come to it when a kid is tased by cops for going through some bushes to see his girlfriend, and when black men are shot in the back and black women are shot in bed.

I come to it when women are denied agency over their own bodies and jailed for “infanticide” when they miscarry.

I come to it when we fail to make the connections between poverty, policy and practices, whether in schools, courtrooms, jails, or other institutions, for surely housing, food security, safety from judicial harm, appropriate quality healthcare, a decent and equal education, and a livable planet are all basic human rights.

Surely there is something inhumane about the Bezos and Zuckerbergs of the world accumulating billions of dollars of wealth while paying no taxes and the poohbahs of parliaments think earning a livable wage is too much to sanction and legislate.

The fact that almost seven million people in the world live in abject poverty according to World Vision-- often situational, generational or geographic -- while wealthy nations like ours look the other way, illuminates the hollow rhetoric of “human rights.” It is also shameful that the United States has the fourth highest poverty rate in the world– nearly 18 percent – and the largest income inequality gap in the world according to the Brookings Institution.

According to the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, a milestone document in the history of human rights, there are two kinds of human right violations: those committed overtly by the state, and those in which the state fails to protect against human rights violations. These violations can be civil, political, economic, cultural, or social in nature.  Civil rights include the right to life, safety, and equality before the law while political rights include the right to a fair trial and the right to vote.

Economic, social and cultural rights include the right to work, the right to education, and the right to physical and mental health. These rights relate to things like clean water, adequate housing, appropriate healthcare, non-discrimination at work, maternity leave, fair wages, and more.

Just take a look at that list of human rights and then try convincing me that we haven’t violated, and that we don’t continue to violate each and every one of them, all the while claiming that we champion “human rights.”

Nelson Mandela and Martin Luther King, Jr. are often quoted on the issue of human rights, reminding us of our failures to protect these rights. Mandela asked that we remember that “To deny people their human rights is to challenge their very humanity.”  Martin Luther King, Jr. admonished us to never forget that “A right delayed is a right denied.”

Mary Robinson, Ireland’s first woman president, asked us never to forget that “today’s human rights violations are the causes of tomorrow’s conflicts.”

Wise words, all. But how sad that we need to hear them over and over again, and that we still fail to instill them in our hearts and our policies.

For me, the words of Eleanor Roosevelt resonate most: “Where, after all, do universal human rights begin?” she asked. Her answer: “In small places, close to home - so close and so small that they cannot be seen on any maps of the world ... Such are the places where every man, woman and child seeks equal justice, equal opportunity, equal dignity without discrimination. Unless these rights have meaning there, they have little meaning anywhere.”

Would that we take to heart what she said at every level of our private and public lives.

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Elayne Clift writes about women, health, and social justice from Saxtons River, Vt.