People often ask me what I do for a living having graduated a year ago. My usual answer is a puzzled look and the single word “lots”. I’m never really sure where to start, but given the time I can usually ramble through the list of things I do with the necessary couple of sentances for each explaining what this job title means or what that organization does.

It’s the question that follows that I find harder to put into words. Not because it’s lots of reasons (although there are a few), but because it’s hard to describe what it is about youth activism that’s so awe inspiring – so addictive almost.

So having struggled again at a family gathering yesterday to explain why I do what I do – I had a think about what it was that hooked me into youth activism and what has kept me here ever since.

I came up with a top 3 (though of course there are many more), which I thought I would share to see if it rang any bells…

Because it’s about other people – but it’s also about ourselves

When I look around me today, I see situations and possibilities that both anger me and scare the life out of me.

What drives me more is the fear. The fear that I could have been, or could one day find myself living in those conditions we see so often on TV. The fear that I (hopefully) have a few decades left on the earth, but that those decades have the potential to be filled with sadness, or violence, or hope, or loneliness, or want.

As an environmental activist, my biggest fear is that I could grow up to live in a time where we truly see the force of negative climate change, that I start to live in one of those apocalyptic movies, or even worse, I start to live in a world where people have lost the will to be activists, lost the belief in the potential of change, have given up the fight.

So when I’m really honest about my biggest driver, it’s my want to protect my own future, the way of life I lead and the standard of living I am currently afforded. Of course I also want to extend those freedoms and privileges to others, but I would be lying to myself and to others if I said my main driver wasn’t my own self-protection.

For that feeling… Just there.

The second big category I came up with is definitely the hardest to describe, but it’s also the most addictive.

It’s a feeling in your chest, right in the middle, and its like something is trying to get out. I think it’s a mixture of excitement and empowerment – knowing that you’ve taken control of you’re life, you’re making a difference to the world, and that you’ve passed on not only your understanding and perspective on a situation or issue, but that you’ve ‘infected’ someone else with that passion and drive to make positive change happen.

Like I said, its hard to describe but Howard Zinn, a prolific civil rights and anti-war activist and academic in the US wrote in his autobiography

“…For most of us, the movement was a life-giving force… To know that even if you felt helpless against the power of government you were not alone in your feelings – that people all over the country, of all ages, black and white, working people and middle-class people, were with you – was to be moved beyond words.”

For me that is definitely still the case today.

Because we’re cutting edge.

In the face accusations of apathy and ignorance, I often like to quote the novelist and activist Pearl Buck who sums up why young people are so successful in and so important to social change.

“The young do not know enough to be prudent, and therefore they attempt the impossible – and achieve it, generation after generation.”

Need I say more?

Because of the potential to change – however hard that might be to see.

Reading the final chapter of Zinn’s ‘You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train’ yesterday, I thought he summed up something which I think we all need to keep in mind more often, and which speaks for itself:

“There is a tendency to think that what we see in the present moment we will continue to see. We forget how often in this century we have been astonished by the sudden crumbling of institutions, eruptions of rebellion against tyrannies, by the quick collapse of systems of power that seemed invincible”

He calls to mind the changes we have seen in the rights of women to vote, the turnaround from widespread acceptance that slavery was right to affording equal status and civil liberties to non-white populations, and of the acceptance of homosexuality. Of course we can’t say that these changes have necessarily been global or even fully implemented at the national level but

“It is that long-term change that I think we must see if we are not to lose hope. Pessimism becomes a self-fulfulling prophecy; it reproduces itself by crippling our willingness to act… Human beings, whatever their backgrounds, are… vulnerable to new thoughts, new attitudes. And while such vulnerability creates all sorts of possibilities, both good and bad, its very existence is exciting. It means that no human being should be written off, no change in thinking deemed impossible.” [my emphasis]

It’s fun!

Finally, because life in ‘the movement’ is fun! In 4 years I can say no two days have ever been the same, I’ve met hundreds of new people I wouldn’t have met otherwise – many of whom have become my closest friends, I have learned amazing new things, been places I wouldn’t have been otherwise, experienced things I wouldn’t have otherwise experienced.

I fear my ramblings will fail to inspire many of you, and many may be thinking “what a selfish, waffling so-and-so” Reading what I’ve written back I almost think that of myself. But I so want to share these feelings and experiences with you all that I only ask that you come to a meeting, go on a march, try it and see if you get hooked too!