Let me begin by asking: Why are young people—people no older than you—so often the soul of social movements?

Just last year, five teenagers in Hong Kong were sentenced to three years of juvenile prison. They were members of a youth group that advocated independence from China’s rule. The judge called them dangerous. But they’d hurt no person. They’d caused no violence. And they were still put in prison for “inciting others to subvert state power.” (If that language seems broad to you, you’re onto something: just about anybody could get charged with it.) Two years before, in 2019, one third of the 2,379 protesters arrested in Hong Kong were under eighteen for merely participating in protests.

These days I live in Taiwan, a democratic country that won its freedom the hard way. But I’m originally from the United States. I’m inspired most of all by the civil rights movement, the struggle for justice and equality for African Americans. Young people formed its heart. In 1963, over five thousand African American students marched to protest desegregation in Birmingham, Alabama. Hundreds were arrested and carried off to jail.

In 1964, college students traveled to the rural South to help register African Americans to vote. They were a mix of Black and white youth who came from all over the country, a part of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). A number of older folks did not want to register to vote. All were either children or grandchildren of slaves. They’d seen it all: violent retaliation, senseless torture, loss of loved ones, and the (possible) futility of trying to make political change.

But the students knew how to build trust. And they did it in ways that aren’t written in the history books. Giving the farmers a ride to work. Listening to stories about how they grew up. Inviting them to their office to listen to baseball games over the radio. One student went back to talk to a frightened farmer over and over. Another took a local person to the voting test eleven times before she passed.

When people talk about the civil rights movement, they often think of firehoses and police dogs and mob violence. But as the sociologist Charles Payne writes, “patient and sustained effort, the slow, respectful work, […] made the dramatic moments possible.” And it was youth who did that work—of connecting, listening, and being creative.

Why, then, are young people so often the soul of such movements?
Here are a few of my guesses.
You care less about status and reputation.
You have less to lose.
You have less fear.
You’re ready to get up and go, and travel to where you feel there is need.
You’re ready to sleep on couches and floors.
You’re not easily worn down.
You don’t take the status quo as given.
You don’t accept it when suffering is rationalized.
You know what it feels like to not be taken seriously. So you channel that feeling when you listen, taking others seriously. You listen with your full heart.
And you listen to your own inner voice.

Students no older than you have successfully agitated against imperialism, apartheid, and social and cultural repression. They have toppled regimes. They have stopped wars. They have helped organize human chains of protest: in Eastern Europe in 1989, in Hong Kong thirty years later.

I’ve worked with middle, high school, college, and law students all my life. I talk to them about their dreams of creating transformative change. One student, B., whom I met when he was nineteen, volunteered at a restaurant that served free meals to anybody who came. A person who could only pay fifty cents for a meal might come back a few months later and pay more. “We welcomed homeless people, migrant workers, undocumented people,” he told me. “It didn’t matter who you were or whether you had money. The policy was you deserve to be fed, you deserve to eat. You deserve dignity.” In Sanskrit, this belief is atithi devo bhava: the guest is god. I love that: The guest is god. Today he works in Malaysia, advocating for people on death row.

Another student, quiet and shy but burning with an inner fire. She was eighteen when I met her. She told me she was afraid of “living a life without purpose.” She volunteered help detained migrants apply for asylum. She later told me that the experience had made her braver. Now she works to get children out of detention. A recent case involved a seventeen-year-old who had been jailed for seven months for crossing the border. He was so dejected at one point, she said, that he wanted to abandon his case and go back to Honduras, where gang members were waiting to kill him. “We’re about the same age,” she said, “but his life has been so much harder.” By patient and sustained effort, she and her team worked to get him out. In June, he was released. She met him at the Greyhound station, and gave him a backpack full of food, water, masks, and clothes. He told her it been four months since he had breathed fresh air. She watched him board a bus to New Orleans, where he planned to enroll in a community college. Today, for now, he is free.

The mystic Simone Weil wrote that if we bring attention to everything we do, we can transform ourselves and our world. Whether you call it prayer or meditation or concentration, this capacity is crucial. It opens us to one another. It opens us to love. It teaches us to ask: What are you going through? I am reminded also of Vaclav Havel, who spent five years in prison for dissident activities before becoming president of Czechoslovakia. Havel wrote often about the urgency of “living within the truth.”

It is a courageous and moral act to live within the truth. It is to refuse a world of consumer seduction, totalitarian logic, and general demoralization. It is to learn how others live, across geography and time. Ask: Am I on the right side of history? Ask not who stands with you but whom you stand with. These are the questions that my own heroes have never stopped asking.