Adults love to tell children that they’re going to change the world. We are often the ones tasked with achieving our parents’ dreams, solving existential problems, and being a source of hope. Young people, we’re told again and again, will not only lead the world but will save it. Yet, if we get angry about climate change or inequality and try to bring about any kind of real change, if we dare to venture out of the enclosed bubbles that have been created for us, we are dismissed and ignored. Nowhere is this hypocrisy clearer than when young people demand the right to vote.
Consider California senator Dianne Feinstein. In February 2019, she found herself facing down a group of school-aged youths who were asking her to vote in favour of the Green New Deal, a policy proposal that aimed to radically transform the energy sector to limit the effects of climate change. “The government is supposed to be for the people,” one of the young people argues in a video posted by the Bay Area chapter of the Sunrise Movement, a youth-led organization dedicated to fighting climate change. When Feinstein learns that one of the young women there was only sixteen, the senator is quick to shut her down: “You didn’t vote for me,” she says. Then she goes with a classic response used whenever young people call for specific action to be taken. “You know better than I do,” Feinstein says. “So I think one day you should run for the Senate and then you do it your way.” “Great,” the student replies. “I will.”
