Environment
The Year of the Affected Generation
On issues like climate change and gun violence, younger people demanded a louder voice in 2018.
I was a curious kid. I kept a journal in elementary school, full of lists of questions: Why do people yell timber when a tree falls? Why do people say “as cute as a button”? Some (or many) of the questions I mulled sound silly, but they reveal some important things. For one, I’ve always been pulled toward unanswered questions. And secondly, older people around me did not think I needed or wanted complete answers.
I was in my first-grade classroom in Queens on September 11, 2001, when the twin towers fell in Manhattan. We all knew something was wrong, but no one told us what; that just heightened our anxiety and confusion. Things were just happening to us, and there was nothing we were expected to understand about why it was happening.