Pretty much everyone in attendance at two Austin Live Earth house parties was a boomer. Is grassroots activism still unhip among young people?
I was a bit nervous about attending a Live Earth event. At 52, I thought I’d be at least twice the age of most of the people I’d encounter. I needn’t have worried.
I attended two Live Earth house parties in Austin, Texas, and saw nobody under 30 except the kids of one of the hosts. I looked for online pictures of other parties elsewhere and saw about the same thing: mostly folks in their 50s with some 40-somethings and 60-somethings in the mix.
Both events were wonderful. I met several excellent people, started a few balls rolling and jumped on a couple of bandwagons, to mix metaphors.
But there was no sign of any successful appeal to youth in what I saw, and the photoblogs of Live Earth house parties I have dug up so far have been pretty similar.
I am hoping this event nucleates some sort of global political movement. It’s not clear whether our problems can be solved even at the national level. Ultimately, the whole world needs to pull together to defeat the forces of sectarianism and fear. I had been left believing that many younger people agree.
Yet as far as I can tell, given the opportunity to make connections they didn’t show up, even though, I guess, they were the target of the extravaganza. Was it like that where you are?
If you’re under thirty, what did you think of the event? Did you participate in any of the house parties? If so, did you meet anyone worth meeting? If not, what kept you away?
