>On Behalf Of Rob Schaap
>It's always the young 'uns, eh? Oldies might be better
> at countering the establishment's ridicule/platitudes etc (that
> side of the
> mainstream media coverage has been consequently poorly utilised, I think),
> but it's the young 'uns doing the hard yards. Good on 'em!
As somehow in between youth and elder, I will say that even in the streets of DC, there were a heck of a lot of non-younguns with there bodies on the line, and, more importantly, the younguns advocating for change were usually waving information and materials produced by "old" activists. A lot of folks keep waiting for the 60s, including the youth rebellion against the previous Left, but that's not what's happening. At the same time teamsters and turtles are converging, so are activists from different age cohorts. In fact, the two are related, since many issue divisions on the progressive side also reflect the single-issue enthusiasms of different activist periods of the last few decades.
I've had the experience for the last decade of alternatively being one of the youngest people involved in groups (Committees of Correspondence) or one of the oldest (affirmative action fights at UCB campus), where the hard work of activists across the age range was clear to me, but the age/issue divisions were also clear and frustrating.
Along with the other excitements of the Seattle/DC protests, the multi-generational convergence of activism is one of the other breakthroughs worth celebrating.
-- Nathan Newman