A Teenager with a Squirt Bottle

Tuesday during Earth Week 9th grader Kiki Brown appeared on the front page of the Durango Herald. She held a squirt-bottle she was using to tie-dye a t-shirt at one of the EC’s Earth Week events. At the same time some commentators were saying with the fire sale on Bear Stearns that the world was on the brink of financial collapse. The juxtaposition of these two facts brought the apathy that so many young people feel into sharp relief. Last week, the EC held 11 events for Earth Week focused on engaging young people in the most important questions facing the world. But who were we kidding? When we can be brought to edge of a worldwide depression by the failure of a mortgage underwriting firm, it’s time to look up in the sky to see who’s really pulling the strings. Before last week I would have guessed that Bear Stearns was a football player. The whole episode made me feel that there are so many layers of entrenched interests with an unquestioned expectation of privilege that any measure of equality, justice, and opportunity is far beyond our grasp.

And then there’s Kiki with her squirt bottle. Why did the EC focus on youth for the month of March? The answer for me is that young people recognize truth. While apathy is certainly present, it most often grows from witnessing how adults and the adult world either ignore or compromise the truth to serve self-interest. The adult world has walked away from the truth of climate change, the truth about poverty, the truth about themselves and their potential to change. Young people recognize these truths, and when the truth faces off with entrenched and moneyed interests, it makes for an interesting staring match.

It is this ability that can shake the corporate foundations of our world. And it is this ability of young people to recognize the truth about the world’s challenges, about how people should treat each other, about the tradeoffs that are a part of life, which will rise from the rubble if our world should collapse. The shirt that Kiki was making that Tuesday had facts on it about the environment and was one way to demonstrate what young people already know about these issues. It was a small way to give voice to the truth. In a staring match between truth and entrenched interests, I’ll take the teenager with a squirt bottle every time.