Night Owls, a themed open thread, appears at Daily Kos seven days a week
Leanna First-Arai at Yes! magazine writes—Amid Shutdowns, Youth Climate Activists Are Writing the Curriculum for a Just Economic Recovery:
On any given weekday before the coronavirus pandemic hit, Michelle Cohen could be found in her Los Angeles office advising students on how to apply for an apprenticeship, or which classes they need to take before earning a high school equivalency diploma. But when public schools in the district shifted to online learning in March, Cohen, who has been an educator for more than 20 years, decided to embrace a new role as a student, in a class led by two instructors who were decades younger than her.
Cohen, who is 53, felt a little uncomfortable at first. Some of the other students in the Zoom classroom were clad in matching pajama sets, sitting knee-to-knee on the floor with siblings, with twin beds and movie posters behind them. “Am I a weirdo?” she asked herself, thinking she could be her classmates’ mother, even grandmother. Eventually, in a breakout room, Cohen was relieved to find that plenty of other adults were in the class, some of whom were older than her.
Sunrise School, as it’s called, is an online training program the youth-led climate activist organization the Sunrise Movement pulled together as soon as it became clear that students would be stuck at home for the spring semester. The group has three levels of online learning experiences designed to train thousands of new leaders in how to push elected officials to pass a Green New Deal.
Cohen enrolled in “The Green New Deal & Coronavirus Crash Course,” an intro class, and showed up every day at 6 p.m. for the four sessions. Amid California’s shelter-in-place order, it felt good to see the same group of people every night, dialing in from across the U.S. and Canada. Her teachers, Genai Lewis and Simon Metcalf, both in their mid-20s, explained what the class would cover with a set of minimalist slides splashed with text and borders in the yellow, black, and white customary of the Sunrise Movement’s T-shirts and protest banners. [...]
The Sunrise Movement isn’t the only youth-led climate group bringing lectures, homework, and pop quizzes to the screens and smartphones we’re all glued to. Fridays For Future, the youth climate action group founded by Swedish activist Greta Thunberg, has hosted regular Friday digital strikes and webinars featuring the likes of activist and award-winning writer Naomi Klein. And the BIPOC-led youth activist group Zero Hour has put out podcasts focused on a new theme each week aiming to call attention to the root causes of the climate crisis. [...]
TOP COMMENTS • HIGH IMPACT STORIES
QUOTATION
“Change means movement. Movement means friction. Only in the frictionless vacuum of a nonexistent abstract world can movement or change occur without that abrasive friction of conflict.”
~~Saul Alinsky, Rules for Radicals: A Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Radicals (1971)
TWEET OF THE DAY
BLAST FROM THE PAST
At Daily Kos on this date in 2007—How Late Is Too Late?
Having always been extremely interested in Daily Kos demographics, let me ask you: How forgiving are you willing to be? What's your timetable on Republicans coming down the rat-lines off the USS Bush?
I'm not talking about the practical side of things, the we'll-take-your-votes-if-it-leads-to-a-veto-proof-majority pragmatism.
What I'm asking is: If a Republican (or Democrat) finally comes around in September and says the U.S. needs a timetable for withdrawal, does that wash away for you what will by then have been that person's five-and-a-half-years of parroting the Administration's war hype, backing the war and the occupation and downplaying all the rottenness, from Gitmo to Abu Ghraib, from Anbar Province to the Walter Reed Annex, from the secret prisons of Thailand to the secret machinations of the Defense Policy Board?
Will you, in the deep recesses of your tolerant liberal heart forgive them and count them on "our side" if they come around in, say, January 2008, before the primaries? June? September? What's your timetable?
On today’s Kagro in the Morning show: Jobs crater again. Trump the slob has a valet?! (Oh, and he's COVID+.) But still, no masks. Barr moves to drop Flynn case. Will it stick? Jacob Wohl pulls his same stupid trick. Suppressing CDC guidance has domino effects for businesses, states & localities.