Last week my daughter turned six. She had a nice party at a local blueberry patch with seven of her friends, picking berries, playing games, relaxing on blankets and just enjoying themselves all the way around. I enjoyed myself too, and I think many of the other adults there did, too. Tonight was another exceptional time, as I was surrounded by young kids who were running, playing, enjoying music in the park downtown, and just relaxing in their way and in the world around them.

I grew up in a low income community in the Midwest that was predominately African American with a few scattered white, Hispanic, and American Indian families. My immediate neighborhood was surrounded by old factories, highways and upper-low income and middle class neighborhoods. Our community was filled with folks experiencing generational poverty, which is the experience of being poor handed down from generation-to-generation, and situational poverty, which is an interuption thrust upon a generation of a family that can either go on and on or be interupted itself. There was also talk of collective depression, the product of wide-ranging alcoholism, drug addiction, parental incarceration, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and other challenging experiences affecting many of the families where I lived, including my own. All these factors were made worse by terrible schools, weak social support structures and distressing patterns of policing and economic imbalance throughout our community.

Yesterday I was scheming with a friend about what I'd do if I won the Nobel Prize for literature. Don't get me wrong - I haven't written anything worth awarding. But if I did I'd like to go the high road, the way of the righteous who hang their win on causes like saving whales or fighting racism. My cause would be engaging youth.

Why do I care? It's been more than a decade since I've worn the title of youth. I haven't had a full-time job as a youth advocate for more than a year. Legislation I've fought for has failed, programs I started have folded and funding I relied on has vaporized. These decades of professional work with and for young people have taught me a lot, and one of the things I've learned is that this heart of mine beats stronger than any of those apparatti.

I care because when I see the news I don't feel a choice. When I hear the statistics I hear the unending possibilities. When I look at the world I see a place that without hope in children and youth has no hope at all; luckily, hope is all around. It's the kid who's audacious enough to speak at the city hall meeting. It's the homeless girl who made a video about her friends' lives on the street. It the club that evaluated their classes and the young city planners who rated youth-friendliness of local businesses. It's also the academic who wrote the paper to make the case that all this deepens civic engagement. It's the tweeter who keeps giving heads-up about discrimination. It's my little sister, who as a mom of 4 at the age of 31 signed up for the anti-adultism group on facebook, and knows exactly what that means.

I am niave enough, or bold enough, or whatever to think we should all care. I believe that and adult who interacts with young people in any respect and is concsiencous enough to read this blog has an an ethical imperative to respond to the crisis status facing young people in our society today. That is why I care. What about you?


-- This is Adam Fletcher's blog originally posted at http://www.YoungerWorld.org. For more see http://www.bicyclingfish.com

Last week on Twitter I asked, "How much of what we call Youth Voice is really just manipulating youth to say what we want them to in their own words?"