YOUNG OPINION - Two From High Schools

"We Don't Believe in Politics" by Camila Domonoske, Harrisonburg HS, Harrisonburg, VA

That's the biggest challenge facing American teenagers today--not war, poverty, debt, abortion or civil rights. It's the fact that we don't believe that the current political system can solve any of those problems. Most teenagers in America care deeply about the future of our country, but all the passion in the world will not help us unless we learn either to work within or to change the current power structure.

We are in many ways like every generation before us. We want jobs, security, a better world for our children someday, stability, justice and freedom. Our concerns mirror the concerns of the general population. However, unlike the older public, halfheartedly involved in democracy, we don't realize the purpose in any involvement at all--and this may destroy everything we wish for.

We don't trust our government. Citizens three times our age could agree that our current leaders hardly inspire faith, but they have long memories and have seen government work. Teenagers today can remember maybe a decade of politics, older youth maybe fifteen years, and most of what we remember are lies, scandals and war. At least Nixon was going to be impeached; we have seen little or no accountability, and few can blame us for our lack of faith.

We don't believe in the power of the ballot. Many of us still plan on voting, but we don't think it'll matter. I live in a red state. When I vote, it will be for the symbolic power of the action, not because I truly believe my voice will change anything. Other young people have simply given up on voting all together.

We aren't that partisan. There are powerful exceptions, and many students are passionately and absolutely supportive of a party. However, most of us either don't know what side we'd like to support or else have moderate and mixed perspectives. As the nation becomes politically more and more divided, and Republicans and Democrats more belligerently sectarian, teens grow less inclined to join fully a party they only partially support.

We don't count on protests to create justice. During the civil rights movement, vast protests represented the conscience of America and sparked change--or so history classes tell us. What great protests have today's teens seen? When hundreds of thousands march to protest war, America invades Iraq anyway. Massive marches for gay rights aim to create a change in social prejudices, and rejoice when the wording of an archaic law is changed. When we are told of vast, effective protests of the '60s, and then view the limited success of political demonstrations today, our disillusionment is hardly incomprehensible.

We don't expect journalists to solve anything. Despite popular opinion, studies show we do consume the media. It's just that nothing we see inspires us with confidence. Older generations saw Watergate; we saw mass media supporting the Administration's claim that Iraq had WMDs. We don't believe that a free press will create a just democracy, which might help explain why a third of us think the First Amendment goes too far.

We don't trust our current government, but we don't believe that our vote can change it. We don't full-heartedly support either political party, and so we are further alienated from today's factional political atmosphere. We don't believe that protests or the media can create change. In short, today's teens have given up on traditional ways to participate in politics.

What do we believe in? We believe in technology, that newer, cleaner machines will help save the environment. We believe in education, and that investing in college will help us find better-paying jobs--which we'll need because we sure don't place our trust in Social Security. We believe that, as we are less racist and sexist than our parents, so too our children will be less biased than we are. We believe the world will continue to get worse but that our lives will continue to get better. We believe, in an abstract way, in justice, peace and freedom, but we mostly fail to see our connection to those ideals. Teenagers today aren't "apathetic"--most of us just don't see the point of politics.

Every other issue facing our generation pales before this one, simply because so much depends on it. As a generation, we've given up on the ability of politics to create change. Our great challenge will be to either engage with the current political system, or to help transform it into one that we trust. Either way, something has to change; if teenagers can't figure out how to participate meaningfully in politics, we will have lost our voice, our impact and our power.

What is sad is the big difference from my generation (Generation-60s) where we did believe we could change things. Personally, I still think we can, even if that's being idealistic.

"A Generation of Peace" by Zaid Jilani, Kennesaw Mountain HS, Kennesaw, GA

"There is nothing, except a tragic death wish, to prevent us from reordering our priorities, so that the pursuit of peace will take precedence over the pursuit of war." --Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., "Beyond Vietnam"

We Americans are blessed. The winds of war rarely reach our shores. Separated by two massive oceans from most world conflicts, we are able to sleep easily at night--knowing that smart bombs will not disintegrate our families overnight and that our children can get up in the morning and go to school without armed escorts.

September 11 was an exception to this rule of safety. The war came home. I remember sitting in my eighth-grade classroom, watching my teacher break down in tears as she told us of the terrorist attack. I had never seen her cry before.

In art class, I watched the Twin Towers collapse again and again on the various news networks. I heard the horrifying screams of the onlookers. One of my classmates remarked on the terrorists who committed the attack, "They'll just say they did it 'for Allah.' "

Already the flames of mankind's worst emotion--hatred--were being built up, even in my middle school classrooms. The next day a girl exclaimed, "We'll bomb them back!" And so we did. The B-52s and Tomahawk cruise missiles and Apache attack helicopters entered Afghanistan and destroyed the Taliban government, which was left after twenty years of foreign occupation and civil war that claimed more than a million Afghan lives.

During the war millions of Afghans fled into Pakistan, my parents' home country. No one stopped to question the wisdom of replying to horrific violence with more horrific violence. No American newscasters mentioned the words "peaceful resolution." The cycle of violence simply continued, leaving thousands of shattered bodies across the battlefields of the twenty-first century.

Our military machine turned next to Iraq. But this time the world reacted differently. On February 15, 2003, more than 10 million people demonstrated worldwide with a single message: No War. Strict conservative Muslim women wearing their hijabs marched alongside feminist activists wearing as little as possible. The world was united, and the largest mass movement in history was born.

The movement ultimately failed to stop the war against the descendants of Mesopotamia, but it did something much more important: It sparked an idea that maybe, just maybe, the world was beginning to say no to war altogether--to say no to the very concept of the leaders of Group A and the leaders of Group B suggesting to their subjects that they engage in the process of murdering each other with all manner of destructive weapons.

The peace movement has changed my consciousness. I believe that my generation must come face to face with the question of war. It is as Robert McNamara states in the documentary Fog of War: "I think the human race needs to think about killing. How much evil must we do in order to do good?"

My generation must look at the standardized and systematic process of killing known as war and say, "No more." We cannot tolerate that our nation, the United States of America, accounts for one-third of all military expenditures worldwide. We cannot tolerate spending more than $250 billion--the cost of our invasion and occupation of Iraq thus far--on war when the same amount of money, according to the National Priorities Project, could have inoculated every child on earth against the most lethal of common diseases for at least the next eighty years.

We cannot tolerate a government regime that willfully ignores President Eisenhower's warning of the "unwarranted influence of the military-industrial complex," which has created a permanent industry of war in the United States. We cannot tolerate the behavior of sending our nation's poorest citizens--caught up by the "economic draft"--to other poor nations to kill its citizens so that our multinational corporations can seize those nations' resources for geopolitical power.

We cannot tolerate allowing our policies to breed hatred across the world, laying the seeds for a thousand more like the Al Qaeda organization--people who have nothing to live for but everything to die for. We cannot tolerate war. Dr. King said it best: "It is no longer the choice between violence and nonviolence. It is the choice between nonviolence and nonexistence."

I dream one day our children will look into our history books and see the evils of our wars: Indian removal, Auschwitz, Hiroshima and the other great atrocities of human militarism. But I dream they will turn the pages and look to my generation, who ended the horror and chose nonviolence over nonexistence. They will be awed by my generation, the Generation of Peace. It is up to us to create such a future.

Zaid reminds me of how I felt as a high schooler when the news of JFK's assassination was announced while I was in class. He is also idealistic which, hopefully, the young will always be.