76 Time February 3, 2020
the adults themselves.
Young people today see too many people
in power who have been so ideological, so
dysfunctional, so weak or so stubborn that they
have failed to act on knowledge that has been
confirmed by science for decades—a bill we are
asking their generation to pay if we don’t act now.
So, from the Sunrise Movement to the Future
Coalition, young people are organizing, educating,
striking and protesting. And we need them. But
even more, we need to do something that my gener-
ation eventually learned was necessary. We must at
last connect the grassroots with the grass tops.
I spent years as a full-time activist, pushing
and prodding, raising money to help keep the
lights on in our office and fund the marches and
demonstrations. But ultimately I realized we had
to touch not just the hearts of the veterans and
families who walked with us on the
National Mall in Washington, but also
the people of open minds who served
under the dome of the U.S. Capitol and
on the other side of the dais at which I
testified as a witness. I had a voice, but
they had a gavel.
Like my generation of activists,
today’s generation can’t do it alone.
Young people can scold and shame,
but they can’t command the floor of
Congress or in parliaments around the
world, make decisions in the White
House Situation Room or cast the votes
in corporate boardrooms that are needed
to alter our current course.
We must bring together the younger
generation, with its moral clarity, and
the older generation, which controls
many of the levers of power. It’s why I am
building World War Zero, a coalition of
people of all walks of life joining together
to respond to this great challenge of our time, much
in the same way we mobilized to respond to World
War II. We want to unite the passion and energy of
the young activists with the change- making power
of policymakers, diplomats, CEOs, military and
civic leaders.
When I was 27 and protesting a war gone wrong,
sometimes those on the other side would confront
us with the slogan “My country, right or wrong.”
And to them we would reply, “Yes, my country,
right or wrong. When right, keep it right—and
when wrong, make it right.” To beat the climate
crisis, to win the war to achieve zero emissions, we
need to help young people make our world right,
right now.
Kerry was U.S. Secretary of State from 2013 to 2017
I
can’t tell you the exact moment I realized
how many powerful people belonging to the
previous generation were failing ours, but I
will never forget the feeling. It animates me
still today. It was the feeling of coming home
from a war knowing politicians were mouthing
words about a conflict that looked completely
different from the one they’d sent us to
fight, only to read the leaked Pentagon
Papers and learn so many were saying
one thing publicly while privately
knowing another. It made me angry. But
more importantly, it made me an activist.
Five decades ago, I spent two years of
my life working with other young veter-
ans to end a war that had gone wrong. We
were attacked. We were criticized. We
were spied on. We were even arrested.
But it was worth it; a democracy relies on
free speech, but it relies even more on the
speech being truthful. It is the truth after
all that sets us free. Speaking the hard
truth is never free, but the price it comes
with is one each generation must pay to
right a wrong.
Today’s younger generation is
speaking their truth about climate
change, and it feels familiar. In 1971,
Richard Nixon sat in the darkness of
the Oval Office stewing about me, slandering me,
spending a U.S. President’s precious time attacking
a 27-year-old naval officer. The tapes weren’t
revealed for decades. Give Donald Trump credit
for one thing only: his temper tantrums are all on
Twitter. Imagine a man in his 70s insulting a young
woman for daring to speak science to power. How
topsy-turvy the world must look to a 17-year-old
Greta Thunberg that she, and not the leader of the
free world, is held to a standard of maturity and
adulthood that Trump has never felt bound by.
A war made the young people of my generation
grow up years too soon, but for young people today
it is the climate crisis, and the realization that
they are currently at the losing end of perhaps the
greatest abdication of generational responsibility
in history. Failed by adults, they’ve had to become
An unjust war made me an activist.
The lessons we learned still apply
50 years on BY JOHN KERRY
^
Kerry, in
1972, protests
the Vietnam
War at
Arlington
National
Cemetery
FIGHTING THE
GOOD FIGHT
VIEWPOINT
STEVEN CLEVENGER—CORBIS/GETTY IMAGES
