Protesters have him 2018continuously marched and shouted in streets across the United States since the election of Donald Trump on Nov. 8, and, if you look closely at the faces of many of these protesters, you'll realize just how young some of them are.
Demonstrations have popped up at colleges and high schools across the country. Pick a school -- Rutgers University, the University of Southern California, New York University, and many others -- or pick a city with high school students -- Miami, Des Moines, Washington, D.C., and many more -- and you'll find a recent demonstration against what the United States may look like under Trump.
The nation's youth have vocally fought back against a president-elect, who has promised to ramp up deportations and construct a database to register Muslims in the country. And there are signs that this activism is translating to more than public demonstration.
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"We have seen an immediate interest [since the election] in the number of folks who have been reaching out to us," Julia Reticker-Flynn, the director of youth organizing and mobilization at Advocates for Youth, told Mashable. "We sent a quick text and had an overwhelming response."
Original image has been replaced. Credit: Mashable Adam Fletcher, the founding director of the Free Child Project, told Mashablethat his phone, email and website have overflown with activism inquiries since Trump's victory. David Moren, who heads Bay Area operations for Generation Citizen, a group that advocates for civics education, told Mashablethat interest in their work has been "on steroids" since the election.
It's perhaps not surprising that youth organizations have seen a spike in attention after the election. Elections and politics are all over the news every four years, and that kind of attention often leads to interest in activism, Fletcher said. But some young activists think there's reason to believe that the younger generation's interest in activism after this election is a little different.
"There's a lot more emphasis now on survival, on making sure our communities are going to make it through the next four to eight years unharmed," Caitlyn Caruso, a 19-year-old University of Nevada Las Vegas student involved with sex education activism, told Mashable. "Young people are angry now more than ever about those results and they're looking for something to do, something to channel that anger."
Trump led by far the more virulent half of what was arguably the most divisive general election in American history, campaigning on increased xenophobia in the form of immigration bans for Muslims and the construction of a giant wall along the United States' border with Mexico. Many who oppose those ideas have sounded the alarm to combat such policies before they're put in place, and young people seem to be heeding that call.
Original image has been replaced. Credit: Mashable Misbah Sarooqi, a senior and the student government president at Wilde Lake High School in Maryland, told Mashableher school had an after-school assembly to air out emotions following the election.
In the assembly, students talked about how to make the school more "inclusive" and "welcoming," after a general election campaign that featured two candidates with wildly different visions for the future of the country. Sarooqi hopes the meeting will build a sense of community and a want to participate at the school.
Caruso, in her activism, is trying to create a symbiosis between the hashtags and Facebook groups of online activism and the on-the-ground work that leads to meetings with politicians. Both of them sense a post-election energy. They're just figuring out how best to harness it.
"What I sense is just this incredible searching for 'what can I do?'," Wendy Schaetzel Lesko, founder of Youth Activism Project, told Mashable. "And the sense that there's an urgency, that it's not something to wait until two years or four years from now, and that's a good pulse."