Reflections from the Tour...A Power Shift in the Air

It was a little over a year ago that Thomas Friedman pissed off a lot of people in dubbing us “Generation Q,” the quiet generation, suggesting that though powerfully idealistic, this generation is perhaps “too quiet, too online, for it’s own good, for the country’s good.” That was October 2007. There was a lot going on before then. And a lot has happened since.

I remember after reading that article on NYTimes.com looking to the bottom of the page and reading, with a smile of agreement, the comments at the bottom of the page from countless outraged young people. One of them was something to the degree of “Dude, have you even heard of Power Shift?”—that was it. I loved that comment, eloquent in its simplicity, in expressing the seemingly inexpressible indignation at the very idea of calling this generation too quiet. It wasn’t for a month later in 2007 that we descended in force on Washington, so I guess we can cut him some slack, but really Friedman, had you even heard of Power Shift?

He pissed people off because he seemed to know nothing about what was going on, nothing about Power Shift, nothing about the emblematic symbol of raising the windmill and all it stood for, nothing about all the actions, the trainings, the gathering and organizing, the countless things young people were doing around the country, around the world for that matter, to be pretty damn loud.

Fast forward one year. It’s January, 2009. Since Friedman’s op-ed, the volume of noise we’re making has not stopped growing. This past Fall, young voters played a crucial role in the 2008 election across the country. Friedman said that candidates weren’t listening to us, that “they could actually use a good kick in the pants.” I’d say we gave it to them, and then some. And in the wise words of Danny Marx, Energy Action Coalition internet guru, the day before the election, “now when we go to congress, when we get together for Power Shift, we say hey, look here, this is what we can do, be afraid of us because we’re the ones who got you here-- we’re going to hold you accountable, and if you don’t listen to us, you’re not going to have a job next time you’re up for office.”

There was a time in the last year that I actually started to feel like the election was the climax of this movement, that after November 4, we could all exhale a little, that the trek might start to turn downhill. And I think it did—can’t you feel the momentum, the rush of downhill wind making your eyes water? But that certainly wasn’t the climax; if anything, this is just a valley between the foothills and the mountains, the trough of a gentle roller at sea before the forty foot wave that lies ahead. There’s something to Power Shift ‘09 that really feels like the next peak, and whether that’s Everest or merely a rather mighty hill that makes it possible to see the vast range of giants ahead, I don’t know. The latter seems the more likely case.

But I do know that the rush of careening downhill is not so much about the ride and the rush itself as much as it’s about getting steam behind us, gearing up for the next uphill fight.

And I do know that we’ll all yell our hearts out from the top of every peak that we reach on our campuses and communities across the country, and the world. I’m eagerly looking forward to our voices coming together the weekend of February 27th, and I can only imagine the distance that sound will travel.

And in my experiences working with young people all over the country in the last six months, I know for certain that the prospects of us ever being “the quiet generation” have been shattered – perhaps from the piercing cries echoing down off mountain tops— shattered to bits and scattered to the wind.