Civic Health Index 2009: Technology and Youth Activism Go Together

One of our biggest battles in reporting on youth progressive politics is pushing back against the faulty view that the use of technology/social networking among youth keeps them from practicing successful activism. Thankfully, we have yet another package of data noting the opposite — those youth who participate in online social networking opportunities tend to be more engaged and involved in their communities offline.

From the National Conference on Citizenship’s 2009 Civic Health Index report:

This year’s survey allowed us to explore the relationships between online forms of engagement and community-based civic activities. We selected a group of Millennials who use social networking sites to promote civic causes, express their opinions on issues, and gather information related to civics, and compared their levels of engagement to that of their peers. We found that Millennials who use social networking sites for civic purposes are far more likely to actively engage in their own communities in each of the activities we measured.

Although we cannot conclude that belonging to social networking sites promotes civic engagement in their community, it is encouraging that civic use of social networking sites cut across income and educational gaps, meaning that low-income youth and youth without college experience were nearly as likely to use social networking sites for civic purposes as youth who had higher income or college experience. As we found in 2008, the civic engagement gap appears to be smaller among young people who engage online, and this year, we found that young Americans who are highly engaged online come from diverse economic and educational background, and are also highly engaged off-line.

Emphasis is mine.

It’s understandably very tempting for elder generations to dismiss peer-to-peer internet-based activism. Even though Boomer and Xer parents continue to join Facebook, they do so for novelty’s sake. The link between technology and youth activism can’t be seen every day, and so, for many, it doesn’t exist.

This report is one more reminder that the connection is there — youth who use social networking sites online are doing more than changing their avatars. They do get involved/engaged in their local communities and make a difference.

Integrating Public Service into the College Experience

One of my favorite aspects of blogging is learning about various programs and initiatives that infuse civic engagement and service-learning into the college experience. Dickinson College in Pennsylvania is prepared to announce the implementation of a public service fellowship program which will serve as one of the best examples yet of an institution linking its values with President Obama’s call for public service.

From the soon-to-be-released release:

After four years of high school, not all students are ready to continue with higher education. For some, a one-year break from academia, commonly referred to as a “gap year,” provides time for students to learn more about themselves and the world. Already common in other countries, the U.S. is now seeing an increase in students seeking time off before matriculation to save money for college; others seek civic engagement or travel. President Obama has called on Americans to participate in our nation’s recovery and renewal by serving in our communities. To support this idea, the federal government’s Web site Serve.gov is an online resource for registering a community program, finding service opportunities and the tools for creating one.

[...]

Students can apply for admission into the Fellowship in their senior year of high school. If accepted, students may defer enrollment until the beginning of the academic year for one, two, three or four years. Students who have engaged in public service for up to four years following high-school graduation receive a $10,000 tuition credit for each year of public service, up to a total of $40,000. Use of credits will be limited to a maximum of $10,000 annually and will be applied to the student’s account when matriculated. The Fellowship amount will be in addition to other institutional grants and scholarships for which the student may be eligible. Dickinson grants and scholarships won’t be affected by receipt of the Fellowship unless the student’s total gift aid exceeds the student’s total cost of attendance. The college will work with students to determine the best timing for using the credits, within the context of other aid.

Students must engage in meaningful public service devoted to improving the human condition and/or the natural environment. A student may opt to join well-established public service programs that offer a wide array of experiences, such as AmeriCorps (which also awards up to $4,725 for college tuition), or the student may pursue an independently designed project with a local, national or international nonprofit organization. In all cases, students must work 30-40 hours a week for 10-12 months (at least 1,200 total hours). The hours may be a traditional 30-40 hour workweek, or a more intensive experience such as disaster relief work that may require 12 to 14 hour days. The public service work may be compensated or uncompensated.

In order to reap the financial benefits of this program, Public Service Fellows must submit an application including an essay stating how they hope to contribute to themselves and society through the work they will be completing. Once the project is complete, the student is then required to submit a reflection essay discussing how the student’s experience will impact his or her Dickinson experience.

In addition to the financial advantages afforded to them, Public Service Fellows will add to an already impressive Dickinson education. Those students participating in the program will contribute to a reflection ceremony open to the Dickinson community by sharing lessons learned from the public service projects. Furthermore, the campus will give Public Service Fellows priority consideration for campus-based leadership positions, such as resident advisor and campus advisor, further emphasizing the importance of giving back to one’s community throughout the Dickinson experience.

Granted, a Dickinson education isn’t cheap to start with. The tuition itself is almost $40,000 a year, and the bill only increases after other fees are added. But as noted above, students can work in public service for up to four years, netting $40,000. While students can only spend up to $10,000 yearly, all of this money is on top of any additional financial aid the school offers (receiving the fellowship does not impact other scholarship and grant opportunities).

One way to add to the program might be to incorporate an academic piece. For instance, instead of limiting students to writing two essays, perhaps those deciding to matriculate at Dickinson any given year would be required to register for a seminar to further explore their experiences, more intensely investigating themes they observed or felt while serving. This would then improve the quality of the on-campus discussion led by fellows.

In 2008, many of the Democratic presidential candidates offered similar proposals on their platforms, but nothing was this beneficial to students. This initiative provides Dickinson with a way to accentuate the importance of civic engagement among its students, while making its valued education more accessible to students predisposed with the ability to work hard and develop strong reflective skills. Those fellows admitted will be offered opportunity after opportunity to learn how to contribute to the greater good, while following in the footsteps of Dickinson College’s founder, Dr. Benjamin Rush, a signatory of the Declaration of Independence. In a public address in 1787, Rush urged every citizen to become an engaged public servant. Now, some 222 years later, with another American leader issuing the same call, Dickinson College is leading the way among institutions of higher education.

‘Yes We Can’ Politics

At his blog today, Harry Boyte describes the link between Obama’s politics and the leadership styles of “civic populist” leaders like Dr. King and Saul Alinsky. Good stuff:

What is at work in Obama’s stance toward Iran, in my view–as in his magnificent speech in Cairo on June 4, expressing deep respect for and engagement with the Muslim faith and the Arab world–are the lessons he learned as a community organizer in Chicago: every culture, like every person, is immensely complex. Every community has democratic as well as authoritarian potentials. Statements from democracy cheerleaders based on simplistic divisions of the world into “good” versus “evil” can do considerable harm if manipulated by democracy’s enemies. People must be the agents of their own liberation, and the most important democratic change comes from within, not from without. A crucial role which a president can play is often not to intervene directly but rather to highlight civic stories of courage and creativity–a concept of the presidency as bully pulpit outlined by the civic engagement committee of the Obama campaign.

Obama’s approach is civic populism. It surfaces the older tradition of democratic self-assertion, collective organization, and cultural transformation represented by figures like Jane Addams, Saul Alinsky, Ella Baker, and Martin Luther King in the 1960s. Such politics of popular agency is an alternative to social democratic politics of the left and or unbridled worship of the market and capitalism on the right.

More simply, it can be called the politics of “yes we can.”

This is something that many political observers, stuck in the dualistic good versus bad politics of the past few decades, can’t seem to grasp — that a president can actually lead by facilitating instead of strong-arming.

Millennial Activism: Service and Politics Are Inextricably Linked

The New York Times has a story up this weekend exploring the increased popularity of community organizing work as a profession-of-choice for college graduates.

A job that has not been all that alluring to college graduates is in resurgence, according to leading community organizers and educators. Once thought of as a destination for lefty radicals committed to living lives of low pay, frustration and bitter burnout, community organizing is now seen by many young people an exciting career.

With their jobs, students envision helping communities address urgent issues — economics or the environment, education or social justice — while developing leadership skills. And these jobs, students say, can actually lead to … well, you know.

“Community organizing has become cool,” said Marshall Ganz, who dropped out of Harvard in 1964 to join the civil rights movement in Mississippi and spent 16 years with Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers. Of course, a tough economy helps attract people to professions they might not have otherwise considered, as does a crusading time when Wall Street has become a symbol of greed, arrogance and irresponsibility.

Peter Dreier, the Professor of Politics at Occidental College who was quoted in the article, wrote an accompanying post over at TPM Cafe discussing community organizing among young people, focusing on the Millennial generation and what he sees as needed policy for this country.

Perhaps because so many of them get practical experience while still in college, working with off-campus groups, today’s student activists are much more pragmatic, savvy, and patient than their counterparts in the 1960s. They are skeptical but not cynical. They are not paralyzed by old ideological battles or identity politics. They respect differences of opinion, including religious beliefs, as well as the right to dissent. They understand that they can disagree with their government and still love their country and its ideals. They want major changes in our institutions and policies, but they know that people need to win stepping-stone reforms before they can envision a different kind of world.

For sure, student interest in political activism and community organizing was going on long before the Obama campaign. In the 1990s, students mobilized against sweatshops and for “fair trade” consumer products, in support of “living wages” for university employees, and around global warming and “greening” America’s college campuses. The AFL-CIO began the Organizing Institute, a summer internship program for college students who want to learn about union organizing. After years of watching the conservative movement spend millions of dollars to recruit and train activists on campuses, and plug them into jobs with politicians, think tanks, and right-wing publications, liberal groups like the Center for American Progress, Wellstone Action, Democracy Matters, the Student Environmental Action Coalition and others began to focus more attention on college students — to invest in the next generation of progressives. In addition, over the past decade, a growing number of colleges and universities embraced the idea of “service learning,” linking classrooms and the community.

I quoted Dreier because of his deeper discussion of the movement among young people to sacrifice their lives for the benefit of others, and because his writing excerpted above deeply (and rightly) contradicts a point the New York Times reporter Sara Rimer tried to make in the main article:

And unlike the 1960s, many of these students don’t seem motivated by partisanship. Drea Chicas, 21, the daughter of Salvadoran immigrants, is a graduating senior at Occidental, where she has taken Professor Dreier’s course and worked with teenage girls.

But politics? “That to me is just a distraction,” she said. “When I’m with my girls, that’s the last thing they have on their minds. They’ve seen their boys shot in their faces, violence against women. Democratic, Republican — that’s not even relevant.”

I was feeling this story until I got to the excerpt above, which came out of nowhere. I disagree with these two paragraphs because service and politics, when both are at their best, are inextricably linked. There is no separating the two, because to practice politics effectively, one must serve others; to serve effectively, creating positive, sustained social change, one must practice politics. Rimer’s differentiation between the two appears to stem from a common association of “politics” with a more Machiavellian connotation, more along the lines of “bitter partisanship” than the actual political process.

What Rimer may have been trying to say by including that student’s quote is that young people today don’t like strict, unyielding ideology, and that I would agree with. As Dreier noted above, youth today believe that in order to pursue many of the imposing, systemic issues we face today, we can’t afford to scream at each other and participate in symbolic acts and back-and-forth bickering that don’t accomplish anything. Those squabbles are irrelevant in our current political environment. Instead, our preferred style of activism involves embarking on a long-term construction job, building our ideal society brick by brick, which, to be most effective, must involve the machinery of the government.

The primary definition of politics in the dictionary is “the art or science of government.” When youth service rates surged in the late 1990s and early 2000s, the political side of change-making still left a lot to be desired. In the 2000 election, only 41 percent of 18-29 year olds voted, compared with 2008’s 52 percent. But starting in 2003 and moving forward, the numbers increased: more youth immersed themselves in the political process, either by voting, volunteering for candidates, working in government offices/departments, attending rallies, and yes, working as community organizers.

So yes – the politics (irresponsible partisanship) that Rimer writes of is not liked by Millennials. But the legitimate definition of politics — “the art or science of government” — has become an essential piece of the Millennial brand of activism. This version of politics is combined with the service that Millennials are known for, and together, they create the positive social change we need to solve our largest problems and, consequently, inspire a surge in community organizing.

Serve America Act

The Serve America Act has been reintroduced in the Senate this session by Senators Ted Kennedy and Orrin Hatch (S.277) and referred to the Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions.

The New York Times highlighted it in an editorial last Monday, arguing that, at a cost of $5 billion, the bill would be a thrifty, yet apt partner to the $825 billion stimulus package that the Congress is looking to pass. The Times also points out that Serve America matches the call for a “spirit of service” that Obama sounded in his inaugural address.

Kennedy and Hatch want to increase the number of full- and part-time volunteers national service volunteers to 250,000 from its current number of 75,000. The editorial goes on to describe the other contents of the bill.

The new positions would be devoted to meeting challenges in a handful of targeted areas: tackling the dropout crisis, strengthening schools, improving health care and economic opportunity in low-income communities, cleaning up parks, aiding efforts to boost energy efficiency, and responding to disasters and emergencies.

The Serve America Act is structured to invite participation by people of all income levels and ages, including retirees. It would offer tax incentives for employers who allow employees to take paid leave for full-time service, and permit older individuals to transfer their education awards to a child or grandchild. A new Volunteer Generation Fund would help nonprofit groups recruit and manage an expanding pool of volunteers.

This legislation dovetails with Obama’s emphasis on responsibility and shared sacrifice. It would create additional jobs and continually improve our infrastructure and way of life. This is a fantastic opportunity for the government to invest in the citizenry, especially given the rise of the volunteer-heavy Millennial Generation and the popularity of President Obama’s message.

Further reading:

Press release from Senator Kennedy’s office

Summary of the bill

Is ‘Service’ Really the Best Word?

Frances Moore Lappe wrote a piece on Huffington Post amid the inauguration festivities this week asking whether “service” is really the best word/tool to use when intensifying national civic engagement efforts.

My own hesitation about the service frame is simple: If I serve, someone else is being served. If I serve, I act, but the other — the beneficiary — does not. Making ourselves servants, we might also ignore our own legitimate needs as well as be tempted to imagine we already know what others’ needs are. In any case “service” seems to create two classes: the givers and the receivers.

And that’s a big problem. Doesn’t this dichotomy help blind us to the reality of the human condition that Martin Luther King, Jr. called us to see? In his “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” he wrote, “We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly.”

Lappe goes on to point out that serving is about more than the “helper’s high” that 95 percent of volunteers reported feeling in a recent study, as a result of helping others. Creating King’s “network of mutuality” leads to developing a “liberation of talents,” that, once relieved from oppression, can bolster our society.

So, instead of “serving” others, which continues the oppression of the receivers’ skills, Lappe argues that we should be sure that a partnership exists that uses the talents of all stakeholders — group problem-solving instead of service.

Lappe cites Obama in this post, given his example as a community organizer with an affiliate of Gamaleil, a large Chicago-based advocacy network, supporting activist leaders of low-income communities. What’s intriguing to me is that I saw Obama’s experience with this approach come into play when he was in Erie last April.

A gentleman asked Obama a question in the town hall portion of the event in which he laid out the problems he was having in his life and essentially asked, “What are you going to do for me?” Instead of providing a litany of policy prescriptions, Obama first asserted that the appropriate first question was, “What are you going to do for yourself,” and then he went on to speak about responsibility, much like he did in his inaugural address.

In a world with rapidly growing technology that breeds an efficiency-first approach, Lappe’s argument and Obama’s philosophy reminds us that even though fixing another’s problem might make us feel good, it doesn’t do anything long-term for society. We should be doing all that we can to collaborate, pool resources, skills, and gifts, and tackle our challenges together.

Cable News Journalism

I took a sick day today.  I sat in my apartment, and I watched MSNBC all day.  As I watched hour after hour of recycled news, I realized I couldn’t take it anymore.  So with that garbage on my mind, I came back here where I can usually find decent news.  And surprise! — I found myself reading about the same trash I had just watched, yet someone dared to address it on air.

Atrios noted earlier today that a recent CNN segment that included Alex Castellanos, a Republican “political contributor,” Paul Begala, the Democratic “political contributor,” and the moderator John Roberts, exhibited horrible journalism.  Here’s the transcript — I’ll meet you at the bottom.

ALEX CASTELLANOS, CNN POLITICAL CONTRIBUTOR: Let’s be a little gentle.
Look, every elected official in this country works under the system we
have, which is you try to get a little bit of your tax money back. You
just don’t want to leave it all in Washington. The amazing thing about
Sarah Palin is when she became governor she actually stood up and said
no. And she made it -

BEGALA: That’s not true.

CASTELLANOS: She took a strong stand. That is rare and that never
happened.

ROBERTS: All right.

BEGALA: That’s just not true. You know, John, the facts matter.
There’s lots of things that are debatable who is more qualified or
less experienced or more this or more passionate, whatever. It is a
fact that she campaigned and supported that bridge to nowhere. It is a
fact that she hired lobbyists to get earmarks. It is a fact that as
governor she lobbies for earmarks. Her state is essentially a welfare
state taking money from the federal government.

ROBERTS: We still have 56 days to talk about this back and forth.

BEGALA: This is the problem. We have this false debate when we ought
to have at least agreed upon facts.

First of all, I didn’t think I’d ever say it, but kudos Paul Begala.  It certainly doesn’t even start to cover for your Crossfire days when you were just as bad as John Roberts (and were told so by Jon Stewart), but it was a good moment for you.  You should treasure it.

As far as Castellanos goes, do we seriously expect more from a right wing bloviator who gets paid, as Atrios noted in his post, to tell, at best, half-truths on CNN?  Of course not.  Castellanos is getting paid to make these opinionated remarks with no basis — why would he think this was wrong?

The person at fault here is John Roberts.  And please keep in mind, given my renewed focus on the common good, that when I criticize here, it is to address a larger point — not merely John Roberts’s suckiness.  This is about the political discourse in this country and how fake it is.  The fakeness can be seen above, as Castellanos tries to peddle misinformation to voters (um, hello:  Palin ate dinner on the taxpayers money in her house).  But that’s not the point.  Begala rightly calls Castellanos out on the lie — AFTER Roberts tried to shut the segment down the first time, deciding not to safeguard the facts of the story, and thereby foresaking his own integrity as a journalist.  So after Begala finishes his piece, Roberts makes his quip:  “We still have 56 days to talk about this back and forth.”

The problem here is that John Roberts thinks he’s getting paid to fill time with a nice little debate about nothing.  He apparently doesn’t care what is said; he apparently has no interest in holding people accountable.  He apparently has no regard for what Americans hear during his time on television.  And my experience with cable news tells me that there are several more like him who just don’t care.  Begala makes the point that I’ve been waiting to hear for a long time — the whole “debate” is FALSE (perhaps he did learn his lesson from Stewart).  In order to have a debate, there absolutely needs to be agreed upon facts.  And I’m not going to say that Democrats/liberals don’t do it either.  I’m sure they do.  But never has it been clearer to me that we’re seriously missing out as citizens if we mindlessly consume this trash and call it being “engaged.”  John Roberts — step it up.

There are many of us who work hard to get young people engaged in this country’s affairs.  One of the obvious ways of staying in touch with what is going on is by monitoring the media.  But if we’re going to be fed this crap over and over, how does that make us better citizens?  How do the young people we work with become better voters and better participants in the process when journalists aren’t even interested in the facts, but more in people yelling at each other to fill TV time?

Yes, it’s one example.  But there are many more out there.  I’d rather a journalist be a bit biased if he’d do so little as acknowledge facts.

Veterans Affairs hospitals no longer blocking democracy!

On August 11, I wrote a post detailing the ban on voter registration drives occurring on the grounds of Veterans Administration hospitals.

Luckily, less than a month later, thanks to heavy pressure by voting rights groups and lawmakers, the VA was forced to get rid of the ban.

The Times has the story.

Now, the only thing I worry about is whether or not they will do all that they can to enforce their new policy by November.

Revisiting Millennial activism

With a Category 4 Hurricane Gustav bearing down on the Gulf Coast today, there are decent odds that we will be seeing images much like we saw in 2005 with Hurricane Katrina.  Fingers crossed, the disaster relief will be managed much better, and as a result, hopefully many more citizens living along the coast have been able to move inland, but the radar and satellite images are still menacing.  After having worked in Mississippi each of the last two Marches, assisting families in rebuilding their homes and their lives from Hurricane Katrina, it’s tough for me to watch this storm slam into the coast.  The satellite looping continuously on The Weather Channel makes my mind loop back to 2005, and I replay my experience, realizing that the storm had a significant impact on me, but in a larger sense, I also understand that it was an opportunity for our generation to put our collaboration and volunteerism skills to use.  For those that are concerned that Millennial activism is limited to the internet, this post is for you.

First, my story.  In 2005, I was a senior at Allegheny College in Meadville, PA.  As Katrina made landfall along the Gulf Coast, we had just started class.  I remember attending class and then returning to my residence hall room to watch — in horror — as those tall signs along the coast started to snap off and fly to the ground, and as houses were washed away.  After the storm sailed through, the images were even more shocking.  Bodies were all over the place, even on CNN.  I remember calling my friend as I watched people trapped on roofs, looking up desperately at the news helicopters that were circling; we both were just astonished that we were seeing this in America, and that there was no help on the way.  Along with another friend (who actually took the lead), we put a fundraiser together for the college community.  We set up tables at various locations in the community one Saturday, and we were able to raise about $2,000.  We also volunteered at a telethon at an Erie, PA TV station, and we raised $13,000 within our hour time slot.  We were proud of what we had done and not just because we organized it spur of the moment, but because we worked together for a good cause.

Something Old, Something New -- very fitting.

After I graduated from Allegheny, I took a job working in Residence Life (supervising RAs) at a small, public school in Northwestern Pennsylvania (which I still have).  As I explained above, the last two years I participated and co-organized an Alternative Spring Break trip to Gulfport, Mississippi.  The first year I traveled with seven students and another staff member.  We worked with the Presbyterian Church and stayed at a “volunteer village” for a week.  Food and shelter was provided for a very minimal fee, and the school took care of transportation.  Each morning, we’d get up and travel to our work sites, which were very different.  We all were able to observe the difference in response between an affluent neighborhood and one that was less well-off.  We met members of the community that were still recovering from what had happened.  As I left that year, already knowing I wanted to return the following year, I remember realizing that it’s not so much the actual physical labor that we offer that is important to them.  It is the time that is invested.  They had stories to tell, and so often, they had no one to hear them.

Stairs to nowhere...

We returned the following year (this past year).  The difference a year makes is impressive: as we traveled along Highway 90 the year before, destroyed signs and ruins of restaurants lined the coast; but this year those restaurants had been rebuilt.  But at the same time, there was still work to be done.  Luckily, the popularity of the program had grown; instead of taking just seven students, our institution committed funds for 28 students to travel.  Seven staff members traveled with them, making for a total of 35.  Because our campus is part of a larger state-wide system, we reached out to our colleagues at other campuses and asked them to participate.  In total, approximately 75 people from all across Pennsylvania traveled to Gulfport this year to help with rebuilding projects — and hearing stories.  We received press coverage from our hometown paper, as a reporter and a photographer traveled with us.  We are planning on going again this year, assuming that Gustav’s impact is not so severe that it keeps us away.

But it wasn’t just us.  Youth volunteerism and civic engagement had already shown marked increases over the past few years:

Two-thirds of college freshmen (66%) believe it’s essential or very important to help others in difficulty, suggests a survey of 263,710 students at 385 U.S. colleges and universities.The 2005 report, by the Higher Education Research Institute at the University of California at Los Angeles, found feelings of social and civic responsibility among entering freshmen at the highest level in 25 years.

Volunteerism by college students increased by 20% from 2002 to 2005, says a study released last week by the federal Corporation for National and Community Service.

And after Katrina, financial support and youth volunteers flooded the Gulf Coast region.  A report from The Corporation for National and Community Service speaks to this:

AmeriCorps NCCC, a team-based residential program for 18-24 year-olds, has made Katrina response its primary focus these past three years, deploying more than 4,000 members to intensive assignments in the Gulf. NCCC members have refurbished 9,500 homes, built 1,450 new homes, completed 52,000 damage assessments, and trained and supervised more than 227,000 volunteers.

…

National service has also fueled the post-Katrina “brain gain” of young professionals who have moved to the Gulf to start new organizations and provide leadership to the nonprofit sector. This is especially true in New Orleans, where scores of AmeriCorps members came to serve and then stayed to work, plunging into jobs and volunteer initiatives to improve their adopted home.

The numbers above aren’t even a totality.  I actually am having a difficult time finding total numbers of youth volunteering for Katrina relief efforts.  10,000 college students went to the Gulf Coast within that first year alone, while thousands more went on trips in succeeding years.

We know that Millennials use the internet as a utility to further their activism; it’s not the be-all, end-all.  The collaborative nature of Millennials, along with their penchant for volunteerism and sheer size, yields a generation of young people determined to make a difference and capable of doing so; the ‘net serves as a conduit through which this difference-making potential flows.  The characteristics of Millennials are geared for events like disasters; in being able to collaborate and work through institutions and organizations to fix problems like the devastation from Katrina, the climate crisis, and the economic recession, the Millennials fuel this nation’s evolution — they just so happen to use the internet and social networking sites as tools to do this.

Yes, this activism differs from that of the 1960s.  Youth today are not parading around college campuses with placards, staging sit-ins in administration buildings, or burning flags (by and large).  But that doesn’t mean the sense of urgency isn’t there.  If you talk to many young people today, we’re engaged because this country’s trajectory is so… alarming.  And with this generation’s addiction to immediate gratification, it’s not surprising that volunteerism has become so popular — young people today want to see the immediate results of their actions, whether it’s loading that next web page, or appreciating the outcome of their latest good deed.

Going back to Sally Kohn’s essay in the Christian Science Monitor from June, the actual outcomes of the Millennial Generation’s social activism are blurring too much with the focus on technology.  Sally accurately outlines what she asserts was the social activism found in the 1960s.

On their own, for example, none of the activists in the civil rights movement had sufficient power and influence to end segregation. Coming together in local committees, led mainly by young people, they used the tools of face-to-face community organizing, developing shared strategies to address shared problems. And they took shared action; in sit-ins and Freedom Rides, they formed groups that were more than the sum of individual parts.

Emphasis added.  The bold and italicized is what Millennials already do today; so I don’t think it’s any wonder why many Millennial activists, like Daily Kos’s georgia10, were confused by Kohn’s piece.  In fact, this model was represented in many volunteer efforts all across the country, especially along the Gulf Coast the past few years.  Youth came together in groups, whether they were students, church members, or responsible citizens, organized around a problem they wished to solve, and they took action.  And yes — what they accomplished in those groups was far more than what they could have done individually.

As Gustav strikes this week, please remember that while there will be people suffering, and those horrifying  images of three years ago might be on our TV screens again, another army of youth — along with others — will be waiting to serve.  I know no better example of Millennial activism.

Veterans Affairs hospitals blocking democracy

An op-ed in the New York Times today by Susan Bysiewicz, Connecticut’s Secretary of State, reveals an alarming policy at Veterans Affairs hospitals to block voter registration campaigns.

What is the secretary of Veterans Affairs thinking? On May 5, the department led by James B. Peake issued a directive that bans nonpartisan voter registration drives at federally financed nursing homes, rehabilitation centers and shelters for homeless veterans.

…

Connecticut’s attorney general, Richard Blumenthal, and I wrote to Secretary Peake in July to request that elections officials be let inside the department’s facilities to conduct voter education and registration. Our request was denied.

The department offers two reasons to justify its decision. First, it claims that voter registration drives are disruptive to the care of its patients. This is nonsense. Veterans can fill out a voter registration card in about 90 seconds.

Second, the department claims that its employees cannot help patients register to vote because the Hatch Act forbids federal workers from engaging in partisan political activities. But this interpretation of the Hatch Act is erroneous. Registering people to vote is not partisan activity.

Unbelievable.  Emphasis mine.

I’m pretty sure troops who left the country and everything they had to fight for their country aren’t going to be the type to be disrupted by an opportunity to register to vote.

And like Secretary Bysiewicz writes, using the Hatch Act to block voter registration efforts run by government is simply incorrect, as these efforts are not partisan activity.

They go off, fight for everyone’s right to vote (and suffer in the process), and when they return and are held up in a hospital, these troops are purposely isolated from the most basic democratic right.