I work for an organization, Our Task (www.ourtask.org) whose vision is “to create a world characterized by a mutually enhancing relationship between humans and the Earth”. To be more specific about our vision, and to hear what young people say about their vision, we worked with several hundred young people to create a vision of the world they would like to inherit. (http://www.ourtask.org/Pub_files/YouthEarthVision5.pdf) From their input, we created a survey that allows young people to rank their hopes and fears for the future and tell us how they would prioritize strategies for achieving their vision. If you have 20 minutes to spare, please contribute your vision to our poll and give us feedback. http://www.ourtask.org/poll/opinionpoll.asp.

“It calls upon us to innovate, politically and economically, at an unprecedented scale. Our politics must be retooled, not only to achieve immediate policy changes but to create new and lasting political majorities. And instead of constraining our economy, we need to unleash it, driving our engineers, scientists and manufacturers to hone their skills and knowledge, and put these forces to work toward building the next energy economy.”

Please, please, please! Let’s get everybody in this movement to understand this well. At least our leaders should get this point and start messaging in this way. Thanks so much!

It is understandable to find that enthusiasm - at least for some - smacks of naivete. But even false ideals are poorly corrected by rejoinders of utter opposition: simple negativity. Or ‘realism’.

Let’s get a few things straight. Politics is process. It begins without coordination, it threatens entrenched political interest and practice, and it prevails only if it has that unconditional merit that escapes summary - or prophecy - in the words of one writer.

There is reason to be enthusiastic, because young people like Teryn and myself are expressly avoiding the polar pitfalls of unqualified advocacy and outlaw political positioning. These, we understand, are by themselves quite useless. The territory of engagement, not just with those of our age group, but with those who have behind them a resume of political and personal experience, is what we understand as process. It is not didactic. It does not swear upon imminant victory or solicit those who are MERELY able and willing, without first acknowledging the potential that each of us has, and what might be possible were we to combine this potential. Finally it is not literary or made for the blogs - which rather connect at a distance the various threads of political activism that do something more substantial than read, smirk, and complain about a faithless free market that, along with the government in fact, produced the very hardware and software that gives us all this voicing and publicity. Those too were people - not ‘government’ and ‘free market’, as some stranded categorical souls of the twentieth century will insist upon making these distinctions for political purposes/orientation, rather than separate them for the very simple fact that there are two spheres that jostle, bargain, entrench, leverage, but within the law, can do nothing about an offspring of challengers who possess a vision.

And it is not a vision that can be borne out according to the mock-clarity of dreams and aspirations alone. This becomes apparent with something so simple as recognition and humility: there are more than one or two or two million-PLUS pairs of eyes and personal histories in this world.

The “climate disaster” can make no sense and provide no value to young people like myself and Teryn. That is because it is doom, and we don’t want to mature for the sake of doom. As Jesse has said, what we oppose - those ‘material conditions of production’ (I smile) that have in part produced this political problem in the first place - we will continue to oppose. Vision is about more than identification and repitition of problems. It is about apprehending one’s own political, personal, social potential and integrity. These are not identities but qualities of life.

Nor can flat criticism of the neoconservative movement - the whole movement reinvigorated and enjoined from disparate parts by the Reagan polity - be worth a damn either. That is the stuff of private conversation and towering editorial force. At times it is appropriate. In fact it is needed. But Teryn and I did not vote for George W. Bush. We were in junior and senior high school. Finally, we are not going to be exclusive in our appeals for help, expertise, companionship, and common ground.

Let us fall flat if we are going to fall flat. We don’t believe we will because there is simply too much to be gained by trying to move ahead with the vision we are dimly, now more brightly charting.