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Real Change Happens Off-Line
Young people must translate on-line action to off-line community organizing to truly effect change in our world.
Originally published in the Christian Science Monitor.
Check dailykos for a rebuttal to this article. And check here for Sally's response.
Today's American young people feel a deep connection to people in Tibet
and Darfur, want to hold corporations accountable to environmental
standards and worker justice, and value the role of government in
meeting our shared needs. Yet the Internet tools that help Millennials
appreciate our interconnectedness may actually erode the community
values they seek.
The Millennials, or the cluster of young
folks born roughly between 1980 and 1995, were raised between two
conflicting phenomena. On the one hand, they have grown up with new
technologies that have helped the world connect more easily; on the
other hand, they have been raised alongside the rise of
hyperindividualism in American culture that has isolated us from each
other and the world around us.
As the Millennials were
learning to walk, Ronald Reagan proclaimed that the only "excuse
government has for even existing" is to protect the rights of
individuals, not the larger, common good. Having once played a cowboy
on the silver screen, Reagan helped transform America into a radical
Darwinian Wild West. Industries were privatized, public school budgets
and other social programs slashed, Wall Street given free rein.
Reagan's British counterpart, Margaret Thatcher, went a step further,
declaring, "There is no such thing as society." In the neoconservative
political vision of the era, people were left to fend for themselves.
At
the same time, the world became more interconnected than ever.
Technology allowed the Millennials not only to imagine the children in
Ethiopia, but to actually see them and, eventually, become their
friends on Facebook. Changing demographics made the new generation more
comfortable with difference and diversity than their parents. Plus,
technological connectivity opened the door to economic interdependence.
Today, workers in China rely on shoppers in Chicago; investors
in Boston track the latest trends from Bangladesh. And, via their
cellphones, the Millennials are plugged into it all.
The
political aims and vision of the Millennials clearly buck the Reagan
"rugged individualism" in favor of the community values of
connectedness, inclusion, and mutual responsibility.
But
social movements are based on collective action. The American
Revolution, the struggle against apartheid in South Africa, and every
significant social change movement in between and since has relied on
community organizing, building mutually responsible communities to
challenge the status quo.
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.
By
contrast, Internet activism is individualistic. It's great for a sense
of interconnectedness, but the Internet does not bind individuals in
shared struggle the same as the face-to-face activism of the 1960s and
'70s did. It allows us to channel our individual power for good, but it
stops there.
This is great for signing a petition to Congress
or donating to a cause. But the real challenges in our society – the
growing gap between rich and poor, the intransigence of racism and
discrimination, the abuses from Iraq to Burma (Myanmar) – won't
politely go away with a few clicks of a mouse. Or even a million.
Millennials
are poised to lead us all to reject the hyperindividualism and
isolation that has dominated our recent past and recognize the deep
interconnectedness and mutual responsibility that is our present and
future.
The lone cowboy story was a myth. Our greatest
accomplishments, as individuals and as a nation, have almost always
come from hitching our wagons to others and working together, not just
in going it alone.
To avoid eroding the values Millennials so
appreciate, and to truly influence the world around them, they must
transform their online activism into off-line communities and build an
effective movement for change. From church basements to campus meetings
to voters' doors, Millennials need to add face-to-face action to their
innate sense of community.
Check Dailykos for a rebuttal to this article. And check here for Sally's response.
Sally Kohn is the director of the Movement Vision Lab and a senior
campaign strategist with the Center for Community Change, which runs
Generation Change, a training program for the next generation of
community organizers.
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