Learning to Follow

For a movement to be sustained, it needs leaders. And there are signs that we may, as a nation, be experiencing a youth movement toward national leadership.

Until a year ago – or, before the most recent mid-term elections – it felt as though America was at risk of becoming a gerontocracy. But the trend toward aged leadership may be turning.

True: President Biden and Senator Mitch McConnell are both 80 years old. But in the month since the mid-terms, Democratic leadership on The Hill has shifted as Nancy Pelosi, Majority Leader Steny Hoyer and Majority Whip Jim Clyburn “have stepped out of the top three leadership roles in the House to make way for members of a new generation” noted Heather Cox Richardson. This move , lowered the average age of leadership by a full three decades, from 82 to 51. 

Two generations are coming up behind us and coming fast: the Millennials born between 1981 and 1996, and Gen Z born in or after 1997. The evidence that these two generations are looking over our aging shoulders lies in voting patterns.

Historically, youth voter turnout has hovered around 20% during midterm elections. In last month’s elections, “turnout was significantly higher in some of the battleground states — including Florida, Georgia, Michigan, North Carolina, New Hampshire, Nevada, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin…[where] turnout was roughly 31% in those states” (NPR).

For me, the midterms stirred hope. I welcomed the utter defeat of zany candidates proposed and supported by Donald Trump. I admit to gloating a bit as we watched his gang of deniers suffer one defeat after another.

But the best, the most promising news that emerged from this year’s elections is the deluge of votes poured in from young people, often in support of young candidates. “Maxwell Frost Will Be the First Gen Z Congressman,” trumpeted the Wall Street Journal’s headline. Maxwell Frost is the first of a crowd that will follow.

By a significant majority, younger voters represent and endorse what I value: diversity, calls to equity and justice, civil and human rights.

But beyond my preferences lies the promise of youth leadership. We don’t need to have the nation wait until we die before younger others can take over. We who are older by decades can actively, purposefully encourage youth to go to the polls, to become and to elect leaders reflecting youth’s (and our own) priorities. Before we die, we could learn to follow our youth rather than tell them to wait.

We can support a host of youth-registration organizations. Check the websites of Rock the Vote, or Alliance for Youth Action, or NextGen America. Go to one of my favorites: 18byvote.org, a “youth-led and youth-driven, non-partisan organization… that aims to help 16, 17, and 18-year-olds understand how, when, and why to vote.” Of those enrolled in “18by” programs, a majority are young people of color, coming from Native American, Hispanic/Latinx, Black, and Asian communities.

Youth voter turnout this year, although impressive, was slightly lower than in 2018. What constrained the organizations driving turnout was, according to each of them, less funding available in a non-presidential election year. Well…!

Youth-registration organizations are training the next generation of Americans not only to vote but to lead. They’re now devising strategies for 2024. Folks from earlier generations have bank accounts we could raid a little, enough to give energy, resources and hope to our youth.

We need their success, and they deserve our support.

The Truth We Tell

I’ve been persuaded in recent months that the time has come for anyone capable of bearing witness to the truth, to do so – including me. My integrity isn’t rooted in who listens to me; it’s based in what I say whether anyone is listening or not.

We’re in a critical time. We need to be clear about the truth because the air around us, especially air that originates as “political commentary” from Fox News and its right-wing partners, is full of lies.

Some lies are huge (e.g., President Biden did not win the 2020 election). Some lies are just ridiculous and would, if no one believed them, be almost amusing (how about the myth that Hillary Clinton was abusing children in a Washington DC pizzeria?). Some lies nearly seem true; others are obviously false.

What concerns me most isn’t one lie or two, but the combinations of falsehoods that weave a dishonest reading of history, for example, that the rioters who killed police officers protecting the Congress on January 6 were legitimate patriot protesters.

“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it,” a claim generally attributed to Nazi Joseph Goebbels. His disciple Donald Trump translated the claim into a strategy: Lie loud. Lie often. Lie consistently.

Every American capable of speaking the truth needs to do it now. This is the time. This is the crisis. The consequences of speaking out are likely to cost some popularity, perhaps expose us to some risk. It doesn’t matter. We need to speak out now.

There are crowds who love the angry speeches delivered by Trump and his minions. They love the fury, the protection of their guns, the domination of women’s bodies, the claim that crime is a pleasure in communities of poverty, the demonstration that immigrants are worthy of abuse. My witnessing to the truth may not change a single mind in those crowds. Their motto may be, “My mind’s made up; don’t confuse me with the facts.”

But testifying on behalf of the truth is still the right strategy. The truth is not that hard to uncover. The parade of witnesses and deluge of evidence produced by one Congressional Committee provides truth enough for any of us. The truth isn’t mysterious, it’s just ugly. And in this setting, silence is complicity.

Perhaps one reader, one friend or cousin, is genuinely uncertain about what’s true and what’s not. I’d invite him or her to look with me at the evidence. The strange theory that promotes hate or rage isn’t justified; it’s a naked claim, and readily set aside by someone of good will. Besides, if a lie can win by noisy repetition, maybe the quiet truth can win support by our testimony.

“What you do to resist evil affects me and my resistance affects you,” wrote Fred Smith. “Every time you tell the truth when you could have lied…you are restraining the power of hopelessness and lawlessness.”

Against the flood of lies and deception stands the truth. Each time we speak the truth, says Smith, “It is one more sandbag stacked against the flood.”

This is my sandbag for today. Join me with yours and we’ll soon have a wall that, unlike the Trump debacle, is truly worth building.

Bearing Witness

 I’m modestly famous for a speech I gave thirty years ago. It was called “A Whisper of AIDS,” offered as a keynote address at the 1992 Republican National Convention in Houston.

On that steaming Wednesday evening, I began by asking the Republican Party “to lift the shroud of silence which has been draped over the issue of HIV/AIDS. I have come tonight to bring our silence to an end.”

I don’t have, or expect, an invitation to any Republican events in 2022. What it meant to be Republican has been eviscerated. I’ve grown old watching that Party’s demise as it has sunk into the depths of prejudice, injustice, brutality and an embarrassing absence of moral integrity symbolized by an ex-president who is a national scandal.

What hasn’t changed in the thirty years since Houston is the need for people to bear witness. In 1992, my aim was to show the world that AIDS was the child of a virus, not the offspring of a moral failing. I was my own example. I bore witness by presenting my dying body as evidence that AIDS was not merely a gay man’s disease; by staking my claim to the reality that “the AIDS virus is not a political creature. It does not care whether you are Democrat or Republican. It does not ask whether you are black or white, male or female, gay or straight, young or old.” I bore witness.

For a decade or two following my evening in Houston I gave speeches, initially several each week, sometimes two or three a day. I traveled the country, and later the globe, speaking and bearing witness to what it means to be HIV-positive, why stigma is a ferocious enemy, and what policies were (and still are) needed to bring justice and healing to the global AIDS communities. I spoke and I spoke and I spoke. Eventually, age and repetition – and a fairly mean and stubborn case of cancer – made me emotionally hoarse. I was increasingly unsure that public speaking mattered. I mostly went quiet.

Whether speaking out publicly is an effective policy-change strategy or not, I’ve come to believe that it’s necessary. Raped women dare not speak out; someone needs to speak for them. Abused children are gagged by their abusers. Political leaders in Arizona and Texas are silent as the bodies of migrants, stuffed into hellishly hot trucks, die at the border. Silence is evil’s best friend.

Speaking out from the relative comfort of my home may not change any realities except one: It changes what I am doing. Ultimately, it changes me.

Viktor Frankl could not undo the Holocaust by the time he wrote Man’s Search for Meaning. But he could bear witness, and he did, thereby giving needed images, memories and models for those of us who came later. He bore witness to the atrocities that are beyond imagination, and to a compassion that was even more stunning.

“We who lived in the concentration camps,” he told us, “can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread.”

He bore witness.

In the days that lie before us, we need to bear witness. Trans children and pregnant women are being denied basic medical care. Already, they are dying under the weight of unjust policies. To maintain silence while opioid-fueled lives generate unprecedented rates of suicides and corporate profit; while racism and antisemitism become campaign slogans about crime; while politicians traffick innocent migrants; while poverty consigns our elderly to whimpering deaths – I, for one, need to end my own silence.

In a simple, quiet act, bearing witness means that I will vote. I will exercise the franchise that Republican power brokers want removed from those they fear will “vote the wrong way”: Black and Brown people. Indigenous communities. Democrats. I have only one vote but I have one. 

Meanwhile, I will bear witness. You’re welcome to join me in breaking out of the silence in which so many of us live our worried lives, fearful that the next election cycle will bring a greater loss of freedoms. Join me in speaking out, in lifting the shroud that hides us.

Come, join me, let us joyfully and adamantly bear witness to the truth!