Iranian Youth Tweet Up a Revolution

What we are seeing in the streets of Iran today is a youth-led revolution driven by the same social networking that elected Barack Obama. Iranian youth are tweeting themselves up a new society.

If we want to see more positive change in the world, it is imperative that adults make youth leadership education a priority. 140 characters on Twitter are not enough--the tweet has to say something worth saying. Tweeting up a revolution can mean very different things to different groups of young people.

Revolution has always been a youth-led phenomenon and what we are seeing in the streets of Iran is no exception. Seventy percent of today's Iranians were born after 1979. That means that the vast majority of the Iranian people are under 30 and were not even alive during the first Iranian revolution.

Most of these Iranians under 30 have cell phones. They tweet, they blog, they text each other and they go online.

The technological means are there, but what will the message be? You can just as easily tweet about bombing as you can about demanding that votes in a democratic election be counted honestly and fully. Some adults have been seeding the ideas of violence with the internet. Where are the other adults, the ones who are working hard online to provide young people with the positive, society-building ideas they need to imagine an alternative to violence and despair?

In the absence of any other large-scale, positive youth messaging, President Obama filled in the gap with his historic Cairo address . The connection between the young people filling the streets of Tehran today and the President's address is obvious, but it is not enough.

Young people both in the U.S. and around the world need the sustained time and attention of concerned adults to mentor them toward a constructive vision of society, the kind of society where problems are solved at the ballot box rather than with IED's.

I volunteer for the Interfaith Youth Core because as an adult I believe that it is my responsibility to give my time and energy to leadership education for young people in how to use their faith and their energies to build up the world. IFYC is one good choice for volunteering. There are many others.

The point is we can't just blog or tweet our way into a better world. Adults who care about a democratic and peaceful future need to work directly with young people so that when they tweet up their revolutions, they will be making change for the better.

Just in case you missed it, I'm inviting you to be one of those adults.

By Susan Brooks Thistlethwaite  |  June 15, 2009; 12:13 PM ET Save & Share:                 
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Posted by: ccnl1 | June 15, 2009 10:26 PM
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