Your ways of approaching issues will differ.

It’s not a prescription it’s a way to get you going. Read this book in any order you want-start at the beginning and read it through, or open at random. There is advice on how to step out of your comfort zone and make something. There is information about specific actions people under eighteen can take. There are sample letters to help you contact your representatives. In these pages you’re going to find different types of materials. It can also mean actively taking part in the political process-going to marches, working for campaigns, posting, debating, creating.… It means asking questions about how things get done, about how society, laws, and cultural norms have come to be. On the most basic level, resistance means not accepting things the way they are.

(And anyone else who wants to read this book.

Here is a book about resistance for teens. “I only know how to make books,” I said to myself. This book came about because I had that strange, sucking feeling in my soul after the 2016 election-the one that made me (and almost everyone I know) ask, “But what can I do? WHAT CAN I DO?” The question haunted me day and night. When the students rose and made the Never Again movement, when you debated senators in a televised town hall a week later, when you led students across the country to take action on gun control … everyone knew that you had changed the program. Tragically, it took the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting in Parkland, Florida, to make this point clear to everyone. In short, you are often better at activism. You have not developed the often rigid ways of thinking that plague adults. We need to look to our younger citizens and non-citizens because you’re the ones coming at subjects for the first time your perspectives, as a result, are fresh and passionate. Adults forget that we are all voters-in-training. You, my teenage friends, are voters-in-training, the same as adults. Adults forget that we knew stuff back then and had opinions and that there is no magic transformation that occurs when the clock ticks you over from age seventeen to eighteen. You know, stuff to make us better members of society. We spent most of our time in school learning stuff like history, social studies, public speaking, composition. We forget that we were all teens-NO ONE HAS SKIPPED THIS STEP. When I told people I was working on a resistance guide for teens, occasionally someone would ask me, “Why? They can’t vote.”

How I Resist by Maureen Johnson