Growing Up in an Age of Protest and Strife

It’s just the water kids swim in now.

My senior year of high school in Mattoon, Illinois, the big end-of-year assignment for our honors English class was to write a 10-page paper, and do a class presentation, about a contentious topic in the news. We were supposed to be persuasive: We were supposed to take a clear, strong side. We could choose anything, fight for whatever we were passionate about. Our teacher, the late great Mr. Willison, gave us free rein to tackle whatever issue we desired, no matter how potentially controversial it might be, something that was a bit of a risky proposition in rural Illinois in 1993. He wanted us to swing big. He wanted us to, as a fellow idealist would coin more than a decade later, to be the change we wanted to see in the world.

My best friend in this honors English class was a kid named Tim — we still talk from time to time — and after class, we sat down to discuss what each of our topics would be. What did we care most about? What difference did we want to make in this world? What lit us up?

When I scanned all the issues plaguing the world in 1993, when I dug deep to discover what most animated me as a budding activist, it was obvious where my fire burned hottest, what injustice I felt like my voice could make a difference — how I could join the fight.