OhNoOKC

@sparklyinnervoid asked: 

i'm a senior in high school and I was wondering if you have any suggestions because my parents aren't supportive of my political interest and are pretty conservative- I'm gonna be submitting a letter about one of my congressmen to the local paper hopefully sometime soon (I have a post about it as the most recent post on my blog if you wanna suggest anything) this is kinda rambley but just advice would be good - thanks

For some context: this user had recently made a post saying she was planning on using ResistBot to send a letter to her representative expressing her position against that rep accepting donations from the NRA and subsequently voting down every weapons reform bill that crosses his path.  Hi Sparkly! (I’m calling you Sparkly now)

You’re a fucking badass for wanting to take direct action by writing your rep, and if you want some awesome and really helpful statistics on gun violence, there are shitloads available. You can find a lot of awesome information on FactCheck.org that describes patterns of gun violence before and after the weapons ban in Australia. If you want to look at statistics specifically for the United States, the Gun Violence Archive has been doing the hard work of keeping track of gun violence since 2013. If you want to get really wonky and look at some actual scientific studies, the Annual Review of Public Health published this paper that details the rates and impacts of gun violence in the United States and JAMA published this editorial looking at the effects of weapons control legislation in Australia.

Since you’re a senior in high school, I assume you’ve had some experience writing persuasive essays. I want to encourage you to read those sources carefully and try to think about how the information they contain could be used to persuade someone to change their mind on weapons reform, and then try to write a persuasive essay explaining your point. Have some people you trust edit it for you (or, if you want, send it to me). Aside from giving you the body of the letter you’ll send to your rep, practicing the arguments in an essay will also help you really learn the information and give you the ability to talk about your points in conversations, too.

I also want to encourage you to take the next step and engage in some direct action. Based on your congressional district, I assume you live in the Richmond/DC area. That puts you close enough to easily attend the March for Our Lives protest on March 24th. I think you should, if you are at all able, try to be there. Sending letters helps a representative get an idea of where their constituents are on an issue, and it’s important, but showing up to march or protest something is an extremely important part of political action. The image of hundreds or even thousands of people standing together to demand change is powerful, and persuasive in ways that a letter can’t be.

Lastly, I want to encourage you to start attending some meetings for people who are organizing in your area. If you’re in DC, you can check out MDC DSA, SURJ DC, Increasing Women’s Participation & Leadership in Politics, or you can pick a political activism group from this list that feels right to you. If you’re closer to Richmond, there is also a DSA chapter there, as well as one for SURJ. Those folks will already be setting up events and opportunities for direct action in your community, and they would love to help you get involved. 

As for your parents: seniors in high school are at the cusp of some really big changes in their lives, and that can make relationships between them and their parents pretty fuckin strained. At your age, though, you absolutely should be figuring out who you are as an individual and separating yourself from them. If that takes you away from sharing their beliefs, you can try your luck at changing their minds, but it’s probably going to be really hard to pull off. It’s hard for parents to take advice from our kids, and I would assume that is even more true for conservative people. What all this means is you may have to just accept their disapproval and learn to respond by respectfully and carefully explaining to them that these are extremely important issues to you and that you feel a sense of civic responsibility to participate in the political process. 

Welcome to the team, kiddo! Go out and change the world.

Hey, kids!1

I hear you’ve been eating Tide Pods and shit. I also notice you’re getting a suspiciously large amount of attention for eating Tide Pods at exactly the same moment you’re starting to get political about some Shit That Actually Matters. So, as a millennial myself, I guess I should welcome you aboard, cause older people did the exact same belittling shit to us when we finally started having opinions. Also, I should probably thank you, because I’m pretty sure it means we millennials aren’t the fuckin freshmen anymore. And, since I’m doing the Life Stages Are High School thing, and you’re the new kids in this metaphor, let me, the Extremely Seasoned Sophomore2, show you the ropes.

Assuming I still even halfway correctly remember being a teenager3 y’all probably still believe the general ideals of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. You probably believe that hard work inevitably leads to success, that the inevitable arc of history is towards justice, and that you can affect serious political change in a matter of a few months or years. You probably still have a beautiful, earnest belief that one determined person can stand up and Change Things. Me and mine were raised with, presumably, the same general beliefs, but if you got a different story, feel free to correct me.

Assuming you didn’t, I’ll be honest with you–that’s not actually how the system works.  Our adult lives have been watching the emperor stripping away those illusions to show us his whole ass while our grandparents, parents, and older siblings have responded by insisting he was still wearing clothes4, not giving a shit because they only get riled up by femme nipples5, or by limply expressing their horror that the emperor is naked without meaningfully challenging the problem of having an emperor in the first place6. But you know what? The emperor fucking sucks. Our government fucking sucks. Most of all, this practically-unfettered market capitalism bullshit fucking sucks. And if you’ll let me, I’d like to disabuse you of that imperial bullshit as fast as possible.

Right now, our politicians on both sides of the aisle don’t give a single fuck about anything but their own money and power and don’t even care if anybody knows it. The older generations of voters are only slightly less corrupted. The shit the Florida legislature recently pulled with some of y’all is, infuriatingly, the current state of normal7. Hell, if you’re brown and ESPECIALLY if you’re Black, it’s pretty much always been normal. We, the proverbial people, are stuck in this untenable situation where the conservative party is filled with old people, bigots, and fascist permavigins, while the liberal party is trying to be both the fiscally-conservative and the fiscally-liberal party for the rest of us. The Democrats suck. Their indolence and cowardice has made them functionally useless. Meanwhile, Republicans have become so cartoonishly evil that I’m not entirely sure we aren’t actually being deliberately trolled by the Koch brothers and Rupert Murdoch. 

And shit, it’s not that millennials haven’t been trying, but what have we accomplished, really?

We rose up in 2008 and used the power of our youth to elect the country’s first Black president, which was pretty cool, until he set records for drone striking and/or deporting brown people. And we’ve put up a good fight against the phalanx the old white rich dudes set against us, but pretty much all of the ground we gained is a sneeze away from being lost again8. And it’s taken a decade even to accomplish this much. Frankly, we’re starting to lose steam. We’re starting to have kids even though we don’t have like, actual houses to raise them in, or health insurance, or stable employment. We’re losing our youthful energy and ability. It’s getting a lot harder for us to keep pushing. And frankly, unless something happens to tip the scales, shit’s gonna stay fucked up. 

So to that end, I am wildly fucking excited to see y’all step into the ring. You have time and you have energy, and you don’t have a shitload of soul-crushing responsibilities yet. But you also don’t have experience, and you guys could probably use a hand navigating this fucked-up hellscape. I know I, for one, don’t want y’all to have to struggle quite as hard as we did to do… well, anything, really. We really kind of had a fucked up time of it, my gender-nonspecific dudes. Adulthood has been pretty uniquely soul-sucking for millennials. Like, other than finally being old enough to abuse drugs until we don’t care how fucked we are, mostly would not recommend9. …Anyway, I wanna pitch something to you: let’s team up. 

I’ve been keeping an eye on you guys, and not just because your antics are amusing (although, tbh, they are), and not just because I’m worried you need a babysitter to keep you from shoving single-serving detergent capsules into your faces like Skittles (you don’t). I’ve been doing it because I see your potential. I see you Seeing things. I see you starting to get angry. I see you starting to stand up and speak for yourselves. And I am so fucking impressed by your bravery and by your audacity and by the clarity of your message. And I would move mountains to make sure that spark of revolution doesn’t get snuffed out of y’all. I genuinely, earnestly believe that if we worked together, we could wrench power out of the hands of these monstrous and rebuild a safer, kinder world than the tar pit they’re trying to drag us into.

So if you’re into that idea, here’s what you do: Step 1) Get on Facebook (yeah, I know, it’s for old people) or Meetup Step 2) Look for local chapters of activist organizations (A few national orgs I like are Showing Up for Racial Justice, Black Lives Matter, Democratic Socialists of America, Electronic Frontier Foundation, and Planned Parenthood. Voter canvassing and registration is also always important. Or, if you don’t want to do any of those, there will undoubtedly be local organizations that need your help.) Step 3) Get a couple friends together and go to a few meetings to learn the ropes and get a sense of what they’re about. Listen more than you talk while you’re doing that, not because your ideas aren’t important, but because at first you should be there to learn. Step 4) Find someone there who is in their mid-to-late-20s and ask them to mentor you. They’re gonna think it’s weird, but only because they haven’t really realized they’re old enough to mentor someone yet. It’s a function of our parents and Gen X consistently refusing to acknowledge us as adults well into our 30s. Step 5) That’s pretty much it, you did it. You’re now part of the revolution. Trill.  Step 6) If you don’t get off the internet and find yourself a member of the #resistance instead of the revolution, go back to step 2 and try again. But don’t be too hard on yourself! A ton of people have gotten caught up in that shit. Just don’t let it trick you into stopping early.

And straight up, any of you–any one of you–is welcome to message me if you need help getting started, or if you’re scared, or if you have random political questions you want my opinions on. I am here for you. I want to help.

Let’s burn this fetid shit to the ground and build something good on its ashes.

With love, –Becky

The good news: OkCupid has radically changed the way their messaging system works such that I anticipate receiving many fewer harassing and abusive messages.

The bad news: I won't have as many fuckboys at my disposal to humiliate for your entertainment.