Notes on a Week When Everyone’s Out in the Streets
It’s been a week of people leaving the places they’re supposed to be.
Last weekend, millions of people (seven million, in fact!) walked out of their houses and jobs and routines for the No Kings rallies. The day was a wild, defiant, sometimes funny, sometimes furious outpouring that felt like a very long exhale after months of grim news. And today, it’s students’ turn.
More than fifty five schools across California, including middle schools, high schools, and colleges, are joining in the Polluters Pay Youth Walkout, a coordinated day of action led by students calling on lawmakers to pass the Polluters Pay Climate Superfund Act. The bill would finally make the fossil-fuel companies that profited from creating this mess help pay to fix it.
Kids in San Diego, Oakland, and Santa Barbara are stepping out of class to tell the adults in charge, hey, if our schools are paying to fix what your generation let break, maybe start sending the invoice somewhere else.
So far this year, California students have already missed more than 54,000 hours of class because of extreme weather. The Los Angeles Unified School District set aside $2.2 billion for climate-related repairs after the Palisades Fire in January. And globally, one in seven students lost education time to heat waves, fires, or floods last year.
There’s something really brilliant about the student’s framing, something that, honestly, progressives have been trying to pull off for years. What these students have done is taken a massive issue like climate change and boiled it down into everyday realities, like missed school days, asthma inhalers, and school funds that should’ve gone to books or field trips being spent instead on cooling systems and fire repairs. It’s still about climate change, but it’s rooted in daily life.
No Kings, by contrast, was sprawling, a little chaotic, and a blur of motives and messages - democracy, labor, rights, decency - but you could still feel a common pulse under it. It was the sense that the same people calling the shots in Washington are the ones calling the shots in Wall Street and the idea that concentrated power, whether it’s political or corporate, always finds a way to extract from everyone else. And the people are fed up.
It’s messy, sure, but maybe that’s the shape of a real coalition. And in the middle of it all are the students.
In the days leading up to today, social media has been full of clips of teenagers painting banners in classrooms, making TikToks between periods, laughing and calling on all of us to please, join them! It’s joyful, and that’s the most striking part. That all this joy is coming from kids who grew up with every reason to despair, but somehow found something a lot more useful to do with it.
I don’t know about you, but it feels like people have decided that staying put just isn’t working anymore.
I believe in you. Maurice from Montréal, Québec.