Here Comes the Next Generation

On Saturday hundreds of thousands of people joined the March For Our Lives. This article won’t all be about the March. We’ll zoom down to the local level too, so stick with me. The whole span is where you’ll find the greatest importance.

The headline march was in Washington DC but hundreds of companion marches happened not only in the USA, but around the world. Although the marchers ranged from young to old, female and male, in every color of skin, this March belonged to students. Unlike marches put together by adult organizations, this March happened a mere 38 days after the event that sparked it, the mass shooting that killed 17 people at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. And although the March demanded better gun control in the USA, it was really an announcement to everyone in a position of power in politics or business.

Their message? Either start using that power to be more responsible and helpful to the larger community, or prepare to be replaced. The young are coming, at or near being eligible to vote, at or near adulthood with adult spending power and adult power to run things, and they are determined to make better use of those powers than the generations before them have done.

Saturday I wasn’t able to attend the nearest March because I was working with other young people (over a hundred, I lost count) preparing for their future. It was a very busy, very satisfying day talking with Rainbows, Brownies & Girl Guides about what it was like to work on the Space Shuttle.

We did space-related activities & experiments too. All the girls got to see an educational show in a portable planetarium. (I was too busy to get to see it. It sounded great.) We had Duplo blocks to build with while wearing ski gloves and safety glasses so it would be like working in a spacesuit. We did experiments to see how a meteor crater can tell us about the angle, speed, size and mass of the strike. We did an experiment with everyday items that illustrated how ground penetrating radar works. We saw why having satellites much higher up allows us to stay in communication with low-orbit spacecraft almost all the time and why using only ground tracking stations didn’t do that.

I thought only the older girls would be able to use the “shielded enclosure” box, but even the youngest girls tried it. A program on my phone showed the strength and frequency of wifi signals. An experimenter would watch the screen while we put a foil-lined box over her. She would tell us how much lower the signals got. Then another experimenter would use a metal oven pan to find an angle that would bounce the wifi signal up into the box from below and make it stronger. One of the Guides took our ‘shielded enclosure’ home to use in a more refined school project.

As I said, what’s important is the whole span of these two events. It’s easy to look at a March and think that energy will dissipate. But it looks to me like more “kids” in the oncoming generation have stick-to-it ability than we adults expect. We see them on their phones all the time and believe they won’t have enough persistence and a long enough attention span to replace us.

But look at what happened yesterday. In 38 days they organized a huge global march. A bunch of those who weren’t in the march spent their Saturday learning about how to become rocket scientists. Even the youngest had a good attention span. And they are determined.

The future is coming, and they are not daunted by anything.