Where is the next Martin Luther King Jr.? The next Dalai Lama? Gloria Steinem? Frances Moore Lapp?? Ani DiFranco? All of these people busted into the wider world, full of ideas and action, before their 30th birthdays.

Where are the young visionaries of today?

For people of my generation, that's a loaded question. During the 1980s and 1990s, the media message about young people was how selfish and apathetic we were. College students consistently polled as the most conservative segment of the voting public. We were said to be reacting against our workaholic, divorced parents-rejecting the idealism of the '60s. We were hypnotized by turbocapitalism, anesthetized by video games and shock TV. We created a lot of great art about how alienated, angry, and escapist we were: Kurt Cobain, Tupac, Rage Against the Machine, the entire techno genre. We painted the landscape with graffiti and medicated ourselves with weed, ecstasy, and status symbols bought on credit.

Until recently, we were still typecast as the licking-our-wounds generation. Nineties-style campus activism was lampooned as political correctness and identity politics. (Our biggest social movement, in fact, was community service: hundreds of thousands of us-perhaps millions-did service-learning in high schools, colleges, and AmeriCorps programs.) But now that's changed. The Enronic economy has us anxious. Israel/Palestine and India/Pakistan have our stomachs in knots. We're freaked out about genetically modified food, wars for oil, and the spread of cancer. As the Antarctic ice shelf crumbles into the sea, it has started to dawn on us that we're going to get left with the bill.

In the past two years, students organized more protests on college campuses than in any period since the 1960s. Tens of thousands of young people marched against the WTO in Seattle, Washington, D.C., Quebec City, and Genoa. And they're winning major victories-living wages for university workers, bans on sweatshop-manufactured clothes, commitments to recruit and retain students and faculty of color-while they're drawing attention to a range of issues from prison reform to dioxin in tampons. Polls now show that the college class of 2005 is the most progressive in at least 30 years.

The rampant commercialization of everything we once held sacred is also fueling this new wave of youth action. As more and more of the symbolism, language, and images that used to be considered cool, spiritually uplifting, or revolutionary (from punk rock and hip-hop to indigenous cultures and feminism) have been exploited to sell everything from jeans to the 'war on terrorism,' young people are noticing that the only thing that can't be bought, sold, co-opted, or marketed anymore is actual political organizing and dissent.