On Thursday middle school students gathered outside the Philadelphia constitution centre during Joe Biden’s ABC town hall to demanded a better, bolder climate action plan from the Democratic presidential candidate.
Sunrise members made about 200,000 calls to help Senator Ed Markey, a leading Green New Deal sponsor, win the Massachusetts Democratic primary election against Joe Kennedy who was backed by the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi. It has since evolved into an influential youth-led political movement, with more than 400 hubs nationwide that use rallies, sit-ins and old-fashioned voter outreach to help elect local, state and national candidates who back key progressive issues such as the Green New Deal and police and immigration reform. ‘We can show up on the streets and wake up politicians.’ Photograph: Sunrise Movement The Sunrise Movement was founded by a small group of disparate young activists in 2017 and initially focussed on helping elect proponents of clean energy in the 2018 midterms. The high school senior recently coordinated a Wide Awake action outside the home of the Republican senator Pat Toomey, a former Wall Street banker who has repeatedly voted against climate action measures. It’s our future on the line not theirs,” said 17-year-old Abby DiNardo, a senior from Delaware county. “Even though we can’t vote, we can show up on the streets and wake up politicians.
In the days following the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sunrise activists woke up key Republican senators including McConnell and Lindsey Graham, demanding that they delay the vote on Trump’s supreme court nominee until a new president is sworn in. The first one targeted the Kentucky senator Mitch McConnell after details emerged about the police killing of Breonna Taylor. Now, in the run-up to one of the most momentous elections in modern history, a new generation of young Americans who say they are tired of asking nicely and being ignored, are naming and shaming US politicians in an effort to get their concerns about the planet, police brutality, inequalities and immigration heard. It’s a civil disobedience tactic devised by the Wide Awakes – a radical youth abolitionist organization who confronted anti-abolitionists at night by banging pots and pans outside their homes in the run-up to the civil war.
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