186
Future Tense
ARIANA GRANDE’S VOICE FILLS THE rented Chrysler
Pacifica minivan: “The light is coming to give back everything
the darkness stole.” Varshini Prakash, executive director of
the Sunrise Movement, bops her head, keeping her hands
at ten and two on the wheel. “When did this come out?” she
asks Jesse Meisenhelter, fellow Sunriser and her copilot on
our 10-hour drive between Louisville and Washington, D.C.
“It’s so relevant!” Humming along, Meisenhelter, 25, and
Prakash, 26 (the same age as Grande), seem more like care-
free coeds than leaders of a self-described “army of young
people” touring the country to rally support for the Green
New Deal—the polarizing climate resolution presented in
February to Congress by Representative Alexandria Ocasio-
Cortez and Senator Ed Markey.
And yet here they are, at the tail end of an eight-city tour,
slicing through the jewel green of the Appalachian oak-
hickory forests as the early May weather shifts from fog to
mist to rain and back again. Thunderstorms are a good
omen, Prakash tells me. She was born during a thunderstorm;
Varshini means “the one who brings the rain” in Sanskrit
(her family is from the now drought-ravaged Indian city of
Chennai). It thundered when she proposed to her partner,
Filipe de Carvalho, 25 (another Sunriser), on a Brazilian
beach in late November, as it did earlier that month during
Sunrise’s occupation of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office,
the action that catapulted the Green New Deal, and the
Sunrise Movement with it, to the forefront of the nation’s
conversation on climate.
More than 200 activists in their teens and early 20s lined
the halls of the Cannon House Office Building in D.C. that
day, holding signs saying we need the green new deal, do
your job, and no more excuses. Fifty-one were arrested for
unlawful demonstration, and the protest produced a flood
of coverage—some 4,000 articles about the Green New Deal
with Ocasio-Cortez as the face of it, bolstered by ranks of
Sunrisers, wide-eyed and resolute, perp-walked in plasticuffs.
“It’s no wonder that they’ve managed to find the youngest
and most charismatic congresswoman that there’s ever been,”
says Bill McKibben, the pioneering environmentalist author,
“because that describes their movement, too.”
“Kids these days are lit and ready to go,” says Prakash of
Sunrise’s base, which is trending increasingly younger—it’s
not uncommon to find preteens at their rallies and events.
Born too late to be seduced by the promises of Reaganite
neoliberalism and coming of age between late–Obama era
languor and early–Trump era despair, Sunrise’s members are
furious at what they see as inaction on climate and ready to
take matters into their own hands. In this they’re joined by
young, angry activists around the world. “That’s been a huge
shift over the past year with Sunrise’s organizing and the
global student climate strikes that were inspired by Greta
