In an unprecedented move, the California Secretary of State has refused
to put PSL candidate Peta Lindsay on the June 2012 primary ballot.
Lindsay, along with another candidate Stephen Durham, was kept off the
ballot despite being submitted as an official candidate by the Peace and
Freedom Party, the only socialist party with ballot access in
California. You can read the letter from the Peta Lindsay campaign in response to the California Secretary of State’s decision on www.VotePSL.org.
California Secretary of State Debra Bowen
has removed me from the ballot for the primary election of the Peace and
Freedom Party. She indirectly attributed her decision to the fact that I am not
yet 35 years old. The Constitution requires that a person be at least 35 years
old to hold the office of president of the United States.
My campaign is challenging this
undemocratic requirement. Denying me and others of the same age the right to
serve as president is in fact a form of disenfranchisement for the tens of
millions of people in the United States who are between the ages of 18 to 35.
Every single day, the president is responsible for shaping policies that
directly impact our lives. So why, in what is supposed to be a democracy, are
so many of us legally denied the right to try to attain that office, to try to
be president and represent our generation’s concerns?
What are the biggest issues facing our
nation today? Undeniably, unemployment is at the very top of that list.
Statistics show that young people, often the last hired and first fired—if they
are hired at all—are disproportionately affected by this crisis. The Pew Center
for Research reported Feb. 9: “Since 2010, the share of young adults, ages
18 to 24, currently employed (54%) has been its lowest since the government
began collecting these data in 1948. And the gap in employment between the
young and all working-age adults—roughly 15 percentage points—is the widest in
recorded history.” Forty four percent of people polled agreed that young adults
are having the hardest time in this economy. Unsurprisingly, poverty rates are
higher for this segment of the population as well.
The president often weighs in on issues of
education, and who could deny that rising tuition costs and skyrocketing
student loan debt are issues that affect young people directly? Tuition has
increased 47 percent in the last 10 years. Last May, it was reported that
student loan debt for the graduating class of 2011 is the highest in history.
It was also reported that a “historically unprecedented” 85 percent of those
who graduated from college in 2011 will be forced to move back in with their
parents, most likely due to a combination of high student loan debt, poverty
and unaffordable housing.
So why systematically deny us the
opportunity to shape educational policy and lead this country? Why can we not
represent ourselves in the White House and ensure that the government provides
access to free education, to jobs, to housing, to the things our generation so
desperately needs?
According to the Constitution, Congress has
the right to declare war. Putting aside for a moment how often that law has
been blatantly violated and otherwise circumvented in the last 20 years, let’s
look at the makeup of Congress. Right now the average age of the members of the
House of Representatives is around 57 years old. The average age of the Senate
is about 62. And when wars are fought, are people like our Congressmen and
women sent to do the fighting? Are they the ones who have to kill and be killed
overseas? No. The average age of men and women in the Army who actually have to
go fight these wars was 21 years old in 2010. Those who call for these
wars are nearly three times the age of the average soldier and are well
protected by that fact from ever having to fight.
So why do we accept that no young person
could serve as president? Is it the consensus that we are all born with some
innate quality that makes a person unfit or unable to lead that then disappears
at midnight on our 35th birthdays? Not too long ago, in this country it would
have been thought that being born a woman, or an African American, would have
made me unfit to vote, or participate in the “democratic” process at all. So
should I just figure I’m lucky that I got this far?
The reality is that the only reason that
people like me, women and African Americans, do have the right to vote is
because of the victory of mass movements. Over many decades, tens of thousands
of courageous people, who refused to be marginalized, organized marches,
rallies, sit-ins, hunger-strikes and protests. Civil rights and voting rights
had to be fought for. And it was usually very young people who led those
movements. Time and time again, we see, it is very young people doing the
fighting.
The average age of the Freedom Riders,
those who put their lives on the line to register Black voters in the South,
was 21. Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Ture) first participated in these rides when
he was 19 and he became chair of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating committee
at age 25. The man he succeeded, John Lewis, was only 26 at the time.
In Cuba, in 1953 a group of students
sparked the revolution against the dictator Batista by attacking the Moncada
barracks. The average age of those students was 26 years old. Fidel Castro, an
important leader of this movement, was 26 at the time. Years later, when the
revolution was won and Fidel Castro became the prime minister of Cuba, he was
only 32. His comrade Che Guevara was only 31 at the time.
In the movement, in revolution and in
socialist society young leadership is respected. Socialism is by definition the
movement of the working class, the oppressed, those who the capitalist system
specifically does not want to have power in society because they fight for
interests that are in conflict with the interests of capital.
So let’s fight to let a young socialist on
the ballot. As Marx wrote when he, too, was under 35, “We have nothing to lose
but our chains.”
