I've thought about this-- about the fairly apathetic generation of which I think I am a part. The truth is that life's not bad in America. Why would I be protesting anything? Sure, war is horrible, we shouldn't have gone to Iraq in the first place, but now it's too late in the game [we can't rightly abandon the instability that we caused]. And in 2003, no one was really sure what the reality of the situation was. It's hard to oppose an unjust war when all of the information is so gray.

I think, though, there is a fair amount of grassroots work centered on green initiatives. More people are driving less, recycling, gardening, composting, reusing, rebuilding. It's an angry mob of young gardeners.

I think sometimes we "millennials" get a bad rap for being too self-involved and apathetic compared to our parents' generation of Vietnam protests and anti-establishment rebellion. We're different, that's for sure, but I don't think we're any less passionate. For a lot of us, we can see how these issues affect us directly. The recession means we have a hard time finding jobs; lack of health care means if we have no jobs, we can't see a doctor, etc.

It's a whole new ballgame of activism, and I think it's really interesting the way our generation uses the Internet to generate ideas and act for causes. We pass around articles and petitions and event invitations to our networks on Facebook; we follow the Iran election via Twitter; we act as citizen journalists and post videos from events on YouTube. I think we can take grassroots organizing to an even more effective level if we use all these new tools along with traditional offline activism.

What distinguishes the Millennials from their baby boomer parents? The issues facing this new generation seem oddly familiar: Climate change, conflict in the Middle East, unaffordable health care, recession, etc. So why are the 70s characterized by protests and marches and revolutionary youth action, while the 21st century seems contrastingly quiet? Perhaps if another draft was imposed, history really would start to repeat itself...