Millenials are on the march

THE MASS arrest of 398 Keystone XL activists outside the White House on March 2 consisted primarily of youth--college students and members of other organizations heavily populated by the millennial generation.

Thousands of young people gathered under the banner of #XL Dissent to demand the Obama administration finally reject the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline. Hundreds among the group committed to directly challenge the state in an act of mass civil disobedience. Mounting the White House fence, we secured ourselves with zip ties, many of us hand-in-hand. As police surrounded the area, barricading us in, we stood warmed by the spirit of collective dissent, blissful in an experience of community that the larger system has all too often deprived us of.

Though initial weather conditions were relatively mild, as an impending winter storm system began to set in, temperatures began to drop. Cold rain started to fall with increasing strength. Nearby, police stood guard in rain gear, steaming cups of coffee in hand. Immobilized by the zip ties that secured us to the fence, though we were able to maintain our resolve, we weren't able to prevent body temperatures from falling.

A rumbling arose from the crowd, hanging ominously over the detainment area. Most were well aware that weather conditions had been slated to worsen--what we weren't prepared for was a war of attrition waged by institutionalized authority who had decided we needed a collective slap on the wrist.

After several hours, the mass arrests began. Reflective of the individualization we have been subjected to in society at large, the hundreds assembled were forced through processing one-by-one, undergoing a systematic separation from the collective.

Biff Anderson, a member of the ecosocialist contingent organized by the System Change Not Climate Change coalition reflected back on previous experience with mass arrest:

This is intentional. We are being disciplined. Mass arrests are not usually this slow. These people, are dressed for the 50 or 60 degree weather that was forecast. Now they are visibly shivering and turning blue at the lips. This is an anecdotal reminder that the barbarism of a system that starves 90 million children to death globally each year on a planet that is home to 7 billion people, yet produces enough food to feed 10 billion people, is not human nature.

It is because of the profit motive. Massive profit for a few at the expense of everyone else. If given accurate information and a real say in how the world is organized for human need, humanity would vote a resounding NO on things like the Keystone XL pipeline with no second-guessing.

AS SOME police stood in warm tents, slowly filtering activists into nearby vehicles that waited to transport us to a jail in Anacostia, others began to filter into the throng of rumbling activists, admonishing the wayward youth. One shivering young woman, teeth chattering, face blue, all 110 pounds, with her hair, body and clothing soaked, gritted her teeth, looking up defiantly into the face of an officer who said, "Maybe you should have checked the weather, maybe you should have reconsidered this action, maybe you're learning your lesson. "

Others, detained for upwards of four hours, began to feel the pull of other inevitable physical needs. One man begged to use the bathroom, even assured the officer to whom he appealed that he would return, that one of the officials standing idly by could accompany him the nearest restroom. The automatic response was, "That's too bad, you're just going to have to go in your pants."

Miserable, cold, facing an unknown period of time stretching ahead before they could be processed, activists lined up along the fence began to put their heads together to figure out how best to manage the conditions. The consensus among most was that warmth could not be maintained in such a stationary position, that the best thing to do would be to liberate ourselves from the zip ties that bound us to the White House fence inside our enclosure.

Once off the fence, some began to dance, skip, or do jumping jacks in order to warm their soaked bodies. Most began to migrate toward one another, forming collective sources of warmth, shifting those shivering most violently toward the center of the huddle. Some who could spare an extra layer shed them, passing additional clothing on to still the chattering teeth of those who weren't faring so well. As the cold subsided, despite the fact that we had been warmed by one another, body heat restored, we stayed packed together, enjoying the feeling of closeness to others that our society so often deprives us of.

Tied to the fence, freezing collectively in individual isolation, we proved that we couldn't be diverted from the task at hand. We were not seduced by temporary comforts that would disband our collective resolve, beckoning from the world outside of our Sunday trial. The seductive allure of a warm spot of respite for one loomed shallow and meaningless if it couldn't be had by all. So we found the solution in the moment in coming together, rather than piecing off in search of the warmth we might find by embracing individual self-interest.

We pushed past the false promise of the comforts we've been told we could have. We saw the possibility of individual comfort for one in its true form: the death of protection delivered by the collective. We know intuitively that the collective is something we ourselves give life to, and is thus more secure than asking for protection and resources to be delivered from above. It is this clarity with which we are coming to see the political promises of the elite as lies: meaningless platitudes designed to stifle any voice calling for the real social--"change" we were promised one too many times.

THE MILLENNIAL generation has been forced into an atomized society rife with externally imposed, class-based state and economic control. Though forced to integrate into such a society, this is not our creation. Still, we have been told to deal with the crises it has generated.

The Keystone XL Pipeline is just one of these crises, holding the promise of environmental devastation that will visit our future in innumerable ways. When left to their own devices today's youth are showing up to provide a few lessons for those who have decided we have much to learn and accept from their deficient example.

In those few situations within which we are enabled even momentarily to exercise agency, most of which can only be found in the act of dissent, humans communally and cooperatively make decisions that benefit the majority. It is clear that if millennials desire a better future than the legacy of dysfunction and inequality handed down from above, they will have to join with others, resorting to collective devices.

Such action will not be defined by the mandates of "empowerment" by way of "personal responsibility" and "self-actualization." Like the majority of society, today's youth can and must look to dissent, to the power found in one another, something that this weekend proves they are all too capable of doing.

The scarring intellectual impact of corporate education reform cannot be understated. The millennial generation is the direct recipient of this form of public policy. As the first downwardly mobile generation in U.S. history, these citizens are the recipients of post-recession economic hardships that play out in places like the job market, the university, our health care system, even in the precarious nature of the damaged environment of the world they have been given to inhabit.

But this generational inequality also takes on ideological and psychological dimensions that are a product of a market-centric, technologically oriented advanced stage of neoliberal capitalism. As a result of forced integration into a system that mandates standardization of thought, uniformity of action, obedience, self-reliance, and the intake of mass amounts of shallow information, millennials have been forced to absorb mental constructs that are designed to impede cooperative forms of critical thought.

Yet if XL Dissent proves anything, it's that we retain the inner will to see the truth behind supposedly legitimate authority and to reject it. If we desire for a better world, a better future for ourselves and generations to come, we cannot hope to inherit such an order. We must fight for it.

Contrary to the image sold in the mass media of what characterizes the youth of today, many know on which side their bread is buttered. The interests of the majority do not lie in obedient integration into the system that is destroying our environment along with all other hopes for a bright future. We have been disappointed one too many times. We are falling into a spiral of downward mobility within which we can never hope for the kind of stability we experienced during the economic era of our upbringing. We are drowning in a pool of student debt and we face a highly uncertain job market.

In light of all this, we are starting to see where real hope can be realized. The theater in which actual social change can be pursued is nothing short of collective action and solidarity. If we will be deprived of community we will form our own communities of resistance. An end to climate change will only be found in system change. And system change will be found in one another.