Students as agents of change

In our latest set of readings, the article that caught my attention was titled "My Age Has no Impact on How Much I Care." This article brought up the lack of respect and attention afforded to young activists and the effect that they can have on change. There are times that I feel that the causes that my generation supports, or even my generation itself, is treated as secondary, insignificant, or inherently illogical. As a former member of the Student Government Association, I felt that while many people showed respect to the opinions of its members, many others simply brushed us aside to confer with 'the adults' or 'the professionals' regarding this subject, even when such people often misrepresented us or failed to at all.

I feel that it's fallacious and a grevious misuse of civic resources to treat youths as non-participants in public debate. By age 9, I had already written a Letter to the Editor, something that many people do not do for their entire lives. When I was 17 I completed an Eagle Scout project that built a Rain Garden--an apparatus that naturally mitigates the effects of stormwater runoff, and the first of its kind in the Lexington area and a model used by the local urban-county government as an example in seminars on the subject. By the time I was out of high school, I had written my congressman, senators, and the president about the genocide in Darfur--again, something that many people simply don't do. By the end of my freshman year of college, I had appeared in televised news for a speech I delivered in Frankfort about the impact of scarce state funding of universities; in addition to that, I spoke to every state legislator of whose district I was a part(in addition to several others) about this issue in person--how many citizens even know the names of their state representatives?

It is very easy for a student to be brushed aside in a society that equates age as the only indicator of credibility on a subject. Some never even consider the fact that a student might understand where the money their school doesn't get goes, that a student is just as capable of influencing their fellow citizens, or that their youth makes students hold the largest stake in what is done in society. A line from an old Native American Song eloquently illustrates this point, "We do not inherit the Earth from our ancestors, we borrow it from our children." In light of that, alone, shouldn't our opinions on issues that have long lasting effects mean something?