When you're young it can feel like everything you read online is trying to pin you down, get your demographics, tell you who you are and what you should buy. But there are now media makers out there interested in more than sending youth to a virtual mall -- young web gurus who have set out to speak WITH teenagers and young adults about their lives, instead of TO them.
A new measure on the California ballot threatens to push thousands of young people into the state's already overcrowded prisons. Curiously, the initiative is sponsored by the state's former Governor Pete Wilson and a band of multinational corporations, including Chevron and Transamerica. What stakes do corporate sponsors have in a punitive state-level juvenile crime initiative?
Death row inmate Mumia Abu-Jamal owes much of his renewed fame to the publicity he's gained through hip-hop. By speaking to youth in a language they identify with, Mumia-centered "raptivism" has become a focal point for a new generation of activists searching for something to believe in.
As we near the one year anniversary of the Columbine shootings, schools around the country are turning to expensive security systems, harsh zero-tolerance rules and even "crisis" drills -- where teachers and law enforcement teams act out scenarios of violent outbreaks, replete with helicopter airlifts for the "victims" -- to fight the imaginary threat of school violence. But long before these policies, juvenile crime rates were going down. It seems that hype, not safety, is fueling the crackdown on kids.
Did you know that sweatshops on American soil have been sewing uniforms for the U.S. military? Or that the same companies that deliver energy to your home may be supporting brutal dictators in Third World countries? Or that the Pentagon has plans to put weapons in outer space, directly violating international law? If you did, you were among the few, because these stories -- and seven others like them -- were just named the Top Ten Censored Stories of 1999.
