The New Dawn of the Student Revolution.

When Jefferson Airplane opened its 1969 sunrise set at Woodstock, Grace Slick declared, "It's a new dawn!" And, in many ways, it was.

Through the early years of that decade, African American students had organized the Freedom Rides, lunch counter sit-ins, and massive marches throughout the segregated South. By the latter part of the 1960s, the American Indian Movement, the Black Panther Party, and Students for a Democratic Society led constant campaigns throughout the nation, forcing citizens to take a closer look at the policies of their government. Montgomery, Alabama; Chicago, Illinois; Washington, D.C.; Oakland, Berkeley, and Alcatraz, California: the list of locations read like a roadmap to the growing power of the people's movement.

On the international front in Mexico, France, Germany, Brazil, Japan, Czechoslovakia, and Great Britain, students had taken to the streets in protest. Revolution was no longer seen as a classroom theory but as the necessary evolution of the world.

But then something happened. Maybe it was the government slaughter at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (NAUM). Maybe it was the government killings at Kent State University in the United States. Maybe it was because the Vietnam War ended. Much of the movement disbanded, and the students left the streets for the offices. It seemed that Jefferson Airplane's lyrics had turned on the Woodstock generation: "One generation got old." The students had largely traded their radical ideals for stock portfolios, summer homes, and BMWs. Except for the brief rise of the anti-nuclear movement and a handful of other factionalized single-issue focus groups, the sun of enlightenment in the United States had set by the 1980s.

Under Ronald Reagan and subsequent conservative administrations, corporations slowly crept in and consumed U.S. culture. They bought memberships in the Sierra Club, World Wildlife Federation, and Conservation Society. They bought and wrote laws that reshaped the economy through such policies as the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs (GATT). They further developed an elaborate system of "corporate welfare" in the form of massive tax breaks and heavy government subsidies.

The corporations bought youth through MTV and designer clothes and taught the philosophy of consumerism to an entire generation. They bought the newspapers (Gannet) and the television stations (Time-Warner, Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation, General Electric). As Noam Chomsky observed of the corporate control of information distribution in 1994: "They don't spend billions of dollars a year for the fun of it. They do it with a purpose."

And their hard work and spending did serve its purpose: the United States fell asleep for the better part of twenty-five years. The laws and social gains that activists had worked so hard for in the previous decades were slowly rolled back. Social welfare and public assistance programs were all but eradicated. The U.S. government continued its war against the foreign poor in such countries as Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Colombia. And the term downsizing became a household word. After nearly sixty years, union busting was again regarded as an acceptable business practice to maximize corporate profits.

And since the corporations owned almost all forms of information, they reported to the nation that everything was fine. Reagan served two terms as president, then ex-CIA director George Bush (note the Iran contra scandal and Guatemala for just two glaring examples of his "leadership") was elected president. Next, the "free tradin" Bill Clinton took office, complete with Grateful Dead guitarist Bob Weir playing at the Inaugural Ball.

U.S.-based companies--with the help of the World Trade Organization (WTO), the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and international trading laws they all but wrote--began going elsewhere. These companies saw no reason to contend with U.S. labor unions, environmental protection statutes, and minimum-wage laws when the same products could be produced overseas without these financial inhibitors. Furthermore, the U.S. government and the IMF were encouraging and subsidizing them in these foreign "investments."

When U.S. workers began to feel the economic strain of "global trade," the companies and their news agencies blamed the spotted owl, foreign countries, and minorities. And in many ways the people believed them. The environmental organization Earth First! and Oregon loggers were literally at each other's throats in 1989, while companies like Boise-Cascade quietly continued their international crusades in developing countries.

But about a decade ago the tide began to turn. Hundreds of thousands of Chinese students occupied their nation's capital, demanding basic democratic rights. The Soviet Union broke up with the promise of democracy for all. The people of Chiapas, Mexico, drew a line and said, "No mas." Los Angeles, California, caught fire. The anti-sweatshop movement began to take shape and sweep across U.S. college campuses.

In 1997, striking United Steel Workers of America and environmentalists joined together against the Maxxam Corporation. At the same time that Maxxam was attempting to bust the labor unions at Kaiser-Aluminum, it was cutting down some of the last old-growth California redwoods. Nationally, labor organizers attempting to unionize workers watched as the companies closed shop and moved to countries where unionization is a crime. People began to make the connection that the same corporate-political system that had developed over the past two decades was damaging everyone's lives.

In 1998, the students of Mexico closed and occupied NAUM, one of the world's largest universities with over 275,000 enrollees. The students took action in response to one of the IMF's "structural adjustment policies" which had "adjusted" tuition from two cents a semester to seventy-five dollars.

At the end of 1999, the American people fully woke from their quarter-century of sleep and took to the streets of Seattle, Washington, in opposition to the WTO. In protests largely organized by students, unionists marched arm in arm with human rights advocates, environmentalists, indigenous peoples, and religious groups in opposition to the deleterious effects of global trade. It happened again, four months later against the IMF in the streets of Washington, D.C., and it didn't end there.

In another part of the world, the people of Zimbabwe are currently taking back their farmlands from foreign corporations, which export the crops they grow to countries like France and Great Britain. The people of Chiapas continue their stand of resistance, as do the students at NAUM. Students in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, took to the streets protesting after the government raided and shut down independent media centers.

Yes, the sun has again risen on a new dawn of revolution. After the Washington IMF protests, conservative economist David Frum wrote an editorial in the April 19, 2000, New York Times criticizing the new student movement as confused and without clear goals. He wrote: "People like the Washington protesters are left with nothing constructive to say about poverty and development." Apparently, Frum prefers to believe that it is still the dark of night.

The demands of the new movement are clear and straightforward. In fact, the movement has only one demand: equal rights for all. This means the freedom to earn a livable wage; the freedom to speak out; the freedom to a decent education; the freedom to accessible health care, home, and food; the freedom to preserve and celebrate our many cultures; and the freedom to live upon a healthy and sustainable planet, regardless of nationality, race, gender, sexual orientation, age, ability, or religious belief. There is nothing confusing about it; there is no hidden agenda. It is our basic and inalienable right as citizens of the Earth to demand nothing less.

As students and activists, we recognize that the main obstacle in our path is the current corporate-political system, which includes the WTO, the IMF, the World Bank, and the current policies of the United States government. It doesn't work for the people, and it doesn't work for the planet. It works for a very few major corporations.

We recognize that these institutions must either be fundamentally restructured or abolished altogether. We aren't asking for a seat at their corporate table; we are offering them a seat at our table.

The primary function of any government is to protect its citizens, not to inflate private corporate bank accounts. We need to localize our economies and subsidize such endeavors as public education, universal health care, social welfare, and sustainable agriculture, to name a very few. We need to stop subsidizing corporate exploitation of the developing world and let those countries develop by their own mandates.

In this undertaking, we must keep in mind what Ramona Africa said at Kent State on May 4, 2000: "Don't ever hallucinate and think that your oppressor is going to map out, through legislation and legal laws, the way for us to stop them. They're not gonna do it."

Countless times before--Tienamen Square, Wounded Knee, Jakarta, Mexico City, and others--we have witnessed how corporations and governments have the police, the military, the press, as well as numerous resources, at their willing disposal to stop the movement of the people. It is foolish even to think of trying to match their material resources.

What we do have, however, is the people: hundreds of millions of concerned human beings and more every day. United, we must nonviolently confront our oppressors each and every time they come at us with their "structural adjustments," weapons, and military. There aren't enough jails to lock us all up, and there aren't enough bullets to lay us all down.

We also have our history. From the Haitian slave uprisings of the 1800s, the American labor struggles of the 1930s, the Cuban revolution of the 1950s, to the student uprisings of the 1960s, we have much to learn. As Egyptian feminist Nawal El Saadawi said, "You must learn from the past, live in the present, and work toward the future." We must continue to form the bonds of solidarity. We need to reach out beyond our own issues and address the source of all our grievances: the same corporate-political system that oppresses all of us.

We can no longer accept a small patch of forest saved in the United States when the policies of the WTO continue to destroy forests in Indonesia, Mexico, and elsewhere. It isn't a victory.

We can no longer accept our brothers and sisters being murdered for their sexual orientation, as we have seen with Matthew Shepherd and countless unnamed others. Throughout this United States it is illegal for two people of the same sex who love each other to get married. This is unacceptable.

We can no longer accept the discriminatory practices of government and its police-sanctioned activities against people of color. We have seen this again and again with the Los Angeles police, the New York City police, the Philadelphia police, the Cleveland police. We have seen this with government policies, including California's I-209, Washington's I-200, and Florida Governor Jeb Bush's "One Florida" plan.

We can no longer allow the multinational corporations to continue Christopher Columbus' 500-year-old holocaust of indigenous peoples worldwide, as we witness with Big Mountain and Yucca Mountain in the United States and aboriginal peoples in Australia and Guatemala.

We can no longer accept piecemeal minimum-wage increases (which still keep full-time workers below the "poverty level") while workers in China, Nigeria, Thailand, and Vietnam earn only pennies to our dollars.

The number of incarcerated U.S. citizens reached over two million people in February 2000. According to the November Coalition, more than half of these prisoners are casualties of the U.S. war on drugs. The number of prisoners on death row increases daily, and a grossly disproportionate number of these inmates are people of color. The dominant philosophy of "lock `em up and throw away the key" is an inexcusable war on the people. It must stop.

The state of affairs is degenerating at an unimaginable rate. When the U.S. government isn't busy expanding corporate control over the planet, it's trying to restart the arms race with a proposed anti-ballistic missile plan. Women and all people of color in this nation and worldwide still endure the arrows of sexism and racism on a daily basis. The indigenous people of the world are still under an imperialistic attack that began over 500 years ago.

Much of the lands and waters of the planet are heavily polluted from insecticides and toxic wastes, and companies like Monsanto, Dow Chemical, and Lockheed Martin continue to produce even more of these deadly toxins. In the name of global capitalism, the few rich get insanely richer and the many poor grow inhumanly more impoverished. This isn't rhetoric; it is reality.

Clearly, we have arrived at a point at which there is no turning back. We can't afford to "compromise" any more of our basic rights. We can only move forward, and we can only do this through our collective unification on a global scale.

Through our own local communities, we must create a global revolution. The responsibility of this revolution lies with the students. It isn't only our history; it is our destiny. We have the resources, time, and ability to educate and mobilize all peoples of this country. And as we have seen in Seattle and D.C. and elsewhere, we are not alone.

Alan Canfora, one of the student protesters shot at Kent State on May 4, 1970, believes: "Clearly there is a great new trend of student activism in 2000. Many of the veterans of our earlier student movement can contribute effort and awareness to assist younger activists of today." We not only have our elders to teach us; we have our sisters and brothers from all walks of life to work and learn alongside.

The students of this country and the world are again on the move. We are the new generation of revolution. And as American Indian Movement elder Madonna Thunder Hawk recently observed, "When the young people move, things change."

Mac Lojowsky is a former member of the May Fourth Task Force and a graduate of the political economy program at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington. This essay was judged first place in the 2000 Humanist Essay Contest in the "eighteen to twenty-four" age category.