As Pissed as Ever, Young Voters Get Organized

By Scott Thill, WireTap. Posted September 20, 2006.

I first talked to William Wimsatt for Salon back in 2004 about the book he compiled with Adrienne Maree Brown called "How to Get Stupid White Men Out of Office: The Anti-Politics, Un-boring Guide to Power," when his newly founded League of Pissed Off Voters had yet to finish off its first year. Back then, the "Bomb the Suburbs" and "No More Prisons" author and one-time grafitti artist (who once tagged his creations as "Upski" but would rather go by the simpler "Billy" nowadays) and his team of tireless activists were waging the uphill battle against the ever-encroaching threat of the Bush administration's second term.

We all know how that struggle turned out, but that's not to say that they didn't put up a hell of a fight. The politically astute organizers of the League of Pissed Off Voters helped push the 18-30 demographic off the couch and into the polls in numbers not seen since Nixon, otherwise known to historians, wonks and Dickens fans as "the ghost of George W. Bush's past."

And that's not all: Wimsatt's plucky League infiltrated the homes and hoods of those that the Bush administration had left for dead (literally, in the case of Katrina), including African-Americans and Latinos, who made up over 50 percent of the new voters on the block. It built scores of local groups that made it their goal to inform individuals who felt locked out of the political process because of their age, color, creed or credit rating, as well as a PAC that drafted up hundreds of thousands of essential voter guides that helped swing much-needed contests, small and large.

Better yet, they stuck around after the election, unlike other organizations that open and close their doors only for election season, as if it were an event of strictly seasonal significance to the rest of the nation (like Halloween or Black History Month, for that matter), rather than the life-or-death, spend-or-save proposition that it was.

Members of the League's Pennsylvania chapter at an anti-war bicycle rally.

They staged nationally broadcasted investigations into the rampant vote-jacking of Ohio that, at least according to muckrakers like Greg Palast and high-society politicos like Robert Kennedy Jr., handed Bush the 2004 election, just as similar shenanigans in Florida handed him the 2000 election. And although the League of Pissed Off Voters would eventually shed their arch colloquialism to become the more accessible League of Young Voters, its laser focus on the Achilles' heel of neoconservative dominance -- voter ignorance and inaction -- has grown only more accurate.

Since then, its members have grown in numbers, support and strength, and are gearing up for the exceedingly important 2006 and 2008 elections as if their lives depend on it. Because they do.

Rethinking youth empowerment

"I was working at McClymonds High School in West Oakland doing youth empowerment and development work, but was starting to wonder what the point of doing leadership work was when there weren't going to be any changes at the state level," confesses Natasha Marsh, director for the League's San Francisco chapter and overall director for California state operations, about her decision to join up with Wimsatt's spirited crew. "There wouldn't be any jobs or places to live anyway. I wanted people with all this leadership potential to have actual spaces where they could enter society. I really wanted to work with young people to change that systemic problem."

The problem is a major one. The youth of America are the ones who fight its wars, pay its exorbitant college fees and inherit the ballooning debt it creates at the expense of generations yet to be born. Although more wired than ever, they are nevertheless estranged from the political process, one that helps determine their fates at crucial times in their unfolding lives. And exploring and tackling those reasons are paramount to the League's mission to break the cycle of disconnection among young voters.

"More often that not, when I talk to young people who don't or won't vote," Marsh adds, "it's because they don't feel they have enough information and are scared of making the wrong decision. No one is explaining how it all works to them, what the connections are between their young lives, their communities and the overall political system. Voting is one thing, but knowing its connection to why your school is being closed is another."

Scott Thill runs the online mag Morphizm.com. His writing has appeared in Wired, Salon, XLR8R, LA Weekly, AOL and others.

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