The first time an adult told me to “shut up,” I realized being a grown-up doesn’t mean anything. No matter your age, your gender, your sexuality, or whatever other identifier you have, people will feel entitled to tell you to shut up. And no one loves to tell you to shut up more than adults. I saw it when I was a climate activist in high school, where grown men made fun of my strike signs and where old politicians told me that my voice didn’t matter because I didn’t vote them into office. And even when I started to vote, people told me my vote didn’t matter. Slowly but surely, I shut up. I used to yell in front of San Francisco City Hall and say mean things to Dianne Feinstein as she walked out of meetings with Big Oil. But I gave up on climate strikes and writing letters. I don’t know where my protest signs are anymore. Greta Thunberg, hear my sins!
If you’re anything like me, you too arrived at college, bushy-tailed and invigorated by grassroots movements, only to discover that the sneakiest way America shuts you up is by distracting you.
Have you ever seen a kid concentrate on writing the letter “g?” It’s the only time kindergarten teachers swear their students shut up. They squeeze the life out of their pencil, stick their tongues out, and for a miraculous few seconds, don’t say anything.
Harvard — and corporate America at large — has us gripping pencils as we clamber up the next golden rung on the Big 4 consulting ladder, run the gauntlet that is LeetCode, and drop thousands on Netflix subscriptions, the newest “It Girl” shoes, or another concert ticket to Harry Styles. And don’t we look silly with our tongues out?
I will be the first to admit that this is what happened to me. I slipped deep under the routine of college, enthralled by all the shiny new things and experiences that were presented to me. At Harvard, I soon forgot all about my aspirations for a better world, lulled into sweet, sweet complacency by promises of a more comfortable life, where as long as I closed the News app and rolled my eyes at infographics on Instagram, I could put my blinders on and gallop towards “success.”
I put “success” in quotes because, as I approach my last year at college, I wonder what true “success” is. While back home in the Bay Area this summer, I found that being blissfully ignorant comes at a perilous price. Where I had abandoned my activist efforts, troubling things had been unfolding under my nose.
It took my little sister to rock me awake. “Oakland airport is expanding,” she told me. “And the air pollution index is going to rise like crazy.” Unbeknownst to me, she had been organizing a coalition of airport union workers, families with young children, high schoolers, and scientists to oppose the airport expansion on the grounds of worsening climate impact on our community.
The Oakland airport, which is located a few blocks away from my neighborhood, is fueled directly by the pipeline that runs through Richmond from the Bay Area oil refineries. With its expansion, not only would my hometown be impacted directly by the smog particles from increased flights, but all refinery communities would also face higher rates of cancer and coronary disease.
If Christine had not caught on and sparked protest, who knows who would have? Most definitely not me. I would have rolled over and let them walk all over my back, leaving sooty footprints in their wake. I kept putting activism and civic duty off, promising myself that I’d get to it when I had time again. What I didn’t realize was that you have to make time for it.
I attended the first of many public hearings by the Port of Oakland to discuss the airport expansion the other day. I didn’t speak. But what I heard inspired me deeply. One man described the layer of soot that coats his deck every week from the flight paths over his house. Another sat with his kids and asked: “How much hotter does it have to get? What will it take to get your attention?” A grandmother, a physicist from Lawrence National Laboratory, and a California public health official spoke about their concerns for themselves and their children. “Adults worry so much about their legacy, so I want the Port to realize what this project really means,” my sister told the panel of city officials. “Think of your kids. We are literally the future, and you could either ruin it before it starts, or save it.”
This magazine issue’s theme is “The Language of the Unheard.” The people who need to be heard are all around us. They are the homeless couples in Harvard Square, the Chinatown activists in Boston, the strippers on strike in West Hollywood, the sick families that live in polluted cities near your suburb. Maybe they’re even your little sister. These people are trees falling in a forest, just screaming into the void if no one is around to hear them.
It is quite a privilege to be able to ignore problems in your community. We are so burrowed in our own lives, playing pretend in corporate America, locked into golden handcuffs, that we are trapped in a bubble of our own making. But it’s starting to heat up in here. Did you think you could escape the wildfires raging in Maui? Or the ones spreading through Oregon? Or the rent-gouging happening in Boston and New York City? No matter how much I studied away at Harvard, I couldn’t even avoid the threat of intensifying air pollution in my own hometown.
You might counter-argue that you have more important things to worry about than, say, strippers who are fighting for healthcare. You need to pay your ConEdison or PG&E bill. You have kids you have to drive to school. You might get laid off like the rest of Silicon Valley. It’s so easy to be distracted. It’s easier to be distracted. But the “unheard” have been sounding the alarms for us. They’re trying to pop our bubble. Let them. We cannot afford to keep looking away from disaster.
If we do open our ears and lift our heads from the boot, we have much to gain. If you can care about a stripper’s rights, then they can extend the same kindness to your anxieties over rising utility prices. It turns out that when we shoulder each other’s burdens, we feel them less. The world’s problems should be and are your problems too. We are a delicate ecosystem, reliant on the strength of individuals to create what we call a society. If one of those pillars fall, then the rest of our system fails, too. We only truly succeed when everyone else does too.
Don’t let the world distract you from meaningful work. Don’t let the world tell you to shut up. Don’t let the world tell you how things should be. It is never too late to involve yourself in local politics or attend a town hall or sign a petition. Dissent can begin with you putting down the iPhone and choosing to go outside.
Dissent begins with choosing to listen, and to pay attention to the world around you.
My political activism looks much different from what it looked like in high school. But I’m doing my best — that’s all we can do. And if you’re reading this, if you clicked on the headline and made it this far, then you are too. It doesn’t matter if you’re a religiously dedicated activist or a bad activist or a bad bad not good activist, what matters is that you are engaging with the world, extending empathy and listening to those around you. The canaries in the coal mine are dying. Take care of your community and it will take care of you. It cannot take care of itself.
