It’s June and graduations are everywhere – caps and gowns, balloons, ecstatic families, crying grads. And looming over it all like a dark shadow is The Future – what is the world students are entering into, what promise does it have, and what meaning are their lives going to have? At one inner-city high school in Los Angeles, where less than half the students who started there as ninth graders make it to graduation, and this year’s graduation included memorials for two classmates who died during the school year, graduating seniors got the opportunity to do something meaningful at their graduation and they eagerly took it. As students sat in their seats on the stadium floor and then walked up to have their name announced and picture taken with the principal, nearly 50 of them, about a fifth of the graduating class, wore a small orange-colored button on their blue gowns. From a distance all you could see was a button. But up close and in person, students wore the button so it could be read:
“No more generations of our youth, here and all around the world, whose life is over, whose fate has been sealed, who have been condemned to an early death or a life of misery and brutality, whom the system has destined for oppression and oblivion even before they are born. I say no more of that.”
Bob Avakian, Chairman of the Revolutionary Communist Party, BAsics 1:13
