I got an e-mail the other day complaining about the NYRA slogan of “Last Civil Rights Movement”:

Your website declares the your personal fight to lower the drinking age is “the last civil rights movement.” What an audacious, unfounded and disrespectful claim!

As Robert Scheer has recently argued the movement for same-sex marriage is a civil rights movement. Activists who continue to promote voting rights are engaged in a “civil rights movement.” I could go on and on, but you get the point.

Now I’m no big fan of the slogan myself, and I defend it only because the membership has chosen it - twice. But if people are going to oppose it, please do so for good reasons. Everyone seems to have weird notions on how the “last” gets factored in. If a current movement has huge momentum, the backing of millions of dollars, and enjoys daily discussion in the media and among people every day (like gay marriage), then why would someone feel threatened by a small upstart movement like youth rights?

Every other civil rights movement out there is bigger, older, more developed, and better funded than youth rights. They are all going to see their ultimate victories long before youth rights will. So when we say “last” we mean after all of those. That’s the point. Its gonna be 100 years or so until we can actually accomplish 100% of our agenda. Starting at square one and reshaping the entire American culture is a pretty hard thing to do. Give us some time. Everything else that’s been around for a while will get done before we well. Don’t worry your pretty little head about that.

In fact the only civil rights movements conceivably “after” ours would be for groups yet to exist. Robot civil rights, alien civil rights and cloned human civil rights for example. Could those one happen? Sure. Does that make our “last civil rights movement” claim audacious and arrogant? Perhaps. But get back to me once we actually have aliens, robots, and cloned humans.

Finally, the deeper reason “last civil rights movement” is appropriate is far more convincing in my mind than simply the timeline argument I laid out above. We say last because our liberation is tied up with everyone else’s, thus if young people had their rights, then in theory all other forms of discrimination would be washed away. I didn’t make up this theory either. Two oppression experts, Tony Harris and Jacob Holdt introduce this concept:

Adultism (ageism) is the first oppression all people experience. Parents must take charge of their relationship with their children. Presenting the world as a dangerous place with murder and hurtful people along with a “That’s the way it is” attitude they instill powerlessness in children. As new forms of oppressions are later introduced, we now accept them without fighting back. Born with an open, zestful and cooperative relationship to everyone we are hurt very early by this irrational behavior of adults. While we are in emotional distress, our vast human intelligence momentarily seems to shut down and the new information is stored wrongly or “jams up” in a tied-up knot, and we are blocked.

Since we cannot understand – or evaluate - such early information from a distress experience, subsequent information tends to get stuck in the same pattern, which over the years becomes chronic - or like a recording which now plays us! Finally we end up with a “distress pattern” of rigid, illogical behavior not unlike that of our parents or other adults. Having gone through such oppression, we then reenact our own experiences on others.

Basically the patterns of oppression are taught at an early age through the experience of ageism. Once unjust power structures like that are demonstrated and internalized, the victims of that hierarchy are far more likely to accept other forms of oppression be they racism, sexism, heterosexism or anything else. If we, as a society, can break ourselves of this early indoctrination into oppression then perhaps we can break ourselves away from all forms of discrimination and oppression.

Like dominoes, if youth oppression falls, then all will fall. Thus in that context I don’t find it arrogant at all to consider youth rights the “last civil rights movement”. Rather it should be seen as an uplifting and universally beneficial claim.

In any event though, I still think we can find better slogans. So if someone wants a new one, then push through a vote on the subject and put it back to the membership. If the membership votes again on it and picks a new one, then so be it. I represent the will of the membership. Right now I represent the vote that twice picked “the last civil rights movement” as our slogan. I am resistant to simply overturn the will of the membership that was fairly and democratically expressed twice.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 27th, 2005 at 10:48 am and is filed under Youth Rights. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.