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Disruptive, adaptive, and fun: Interview at ThinkProgress

I talked with Jason Linkins at ThinkProgress about protests and how they happen, the March For Our Lives, how I wish I had a formula but I don’t and how the best advice I can give is to adults, to not be the person who tells young people that they can’t change the world.

[L]ast week, when they had the school walk-out, if you look at the schools that had the walk-outs, they’re all over the country. They’re in affluent suburban districts but they’re also in the city — they’re in Baltimore and Miami and New York and Chicago. People from radically different backgrounds are connecting to what’s going on here — they’re saying, “I should not have to worry about this shit as a teenager.” And “this shit” can be a lot of things: they’re protesting a lack of gun control, but in doing that, they’re protesting a non-functional democracy where the adults in the room — big old air quotes around “adults in the room” — are not doing what they should do. They’re not doing much of anything. They’re sitting on their asses or they’re trying to arm teachers. They’re either doing nothing or they’re doing things that are actively horrifying and harmful.

Those are the options: the way things are now, or actively horrifying. And you see masses of teenagers saying, “No, these two options are terrible and we refuse them both.”

Read the rest at ThinkProgress.

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