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You are here: Home / Politics / Spring Chickens

Spring Chickens

September 24th, 2019 by Sallie Bingham in Politics Leave a Comment

Santa Fe Climate Change Protests – photo by Seth Roffman

They are so beautiful, the young people—from press photos, largely young women—who marched through the streets of our cities and towns Saturday demanding crisis responses to climate change, including strong measures to reduce the individual and corporate causes of the problem—although the airlines, possibly the biggest polluters, were omitted.

I am not criticizing or diminishing our valiant young to say that their strong protests will likely not cause significant change.

There are, I think, two reasons for this: one corporate and one personal.

The parents of these protestors are not going to enlarge the impact of their permissiveness to taking actions to fight for the protestors as inheritors.

They are so beautiful, the young people—from press photos, largely young women—who marched through the streets of our cities and towns Saturday demanding crisis responses to climate change.

We have to admit that without a bitter struggle on the part of adults, these warriors will not be able to bring about change.

They are not represented on corporate boards in either the profit or the non-profit sector. What comfortable middle-class board wants to cope with these troublemakers? They would not easily conform to corporate norms on the part of boards and investors.

Every investment would be questioned about its climate effect.

Nor are they represented equally in voter registration roles, because of their disillusionment with our bankrupt system, whether labeled Democratic or Republican—our Democratic representatives quickly buckle when their local interests are involved, as is happening here in New Mexico with the disastrous expansion of “our” nuclear industry—or through difficulties with our cumbersome registration requirements, lack of a car to get to polling places, or problems with literacy, or with the English language, or with fear of ICE.

The absence of these young voices puts our whole political system out of whack, particularly here in New Mexico, where fifty percent of our population speaks Spanish.

If these valiant troublemakers do not inherit from their less innovative, prosperous white parents (and this could be particularly true for girls because of heavier social requirements and the still lingering rule of primogeniture), they will never be members of the ruling class.

Santa Fe Climate Change Protests – photo by Seth Roffman

And it is the white ruling class and its sycophants and political servants that prevent change.

That rebellious generation, now grandparents, did not succeed in passing their rebellious virtues on to their children, or their grandchildren.

The innate conformity in marriage and childrearing seems to prevent it.

Who wants to stand at the altar or its substitute and, in addition to vowing adherence to a person or a religious code, vow adherence to rebellion?

It might be the grandparents in the audience who would be most horrified.

Who wants to vow at a nursery school parental interview—now held when the applicant is as young as three—that inequality in hiring or the use of fossil fuels in the school would not be tolerated?

End of interview.

I’m not blaming no spring chickens; I am one of them, and I have never taken part in any such battle, even had the battle existed. I did not want to see my descendants left out of the system, including those who would be cut out as potential troublemakers, for which there are a multitude of excuses, impoverished, or driven into the wilderness.

The experience is soul-strengthening, but we live in a world that does not always recognize the existence of soul.

And perhaps the widespread upper class white parental project of permissiveness which grants small children many decisions previously committed to their parents has developed a level of independence in our offspring that may be hard to control politically.

Nevertheless, rise up, no spring chickens! The future of our offspring, and of our planet, probably depends on us.

Santa Fe Climate Change Protests – photo by Seth Roffman

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In Politics Santa Fe

A long and fruitful career as a writer began in 1960 with the publication of Sallie Bingham's novel, After Such Knowledge. This was followed by 15 collections of short stories in addition to novels, memoirs and plays, as well as the 2020 biography The Silver Swan: In Search of Doris Duke.

Her latest book, Taken by the Shawnee, is a work of historical fiction published by Turtle Point Press in June of 2024. Her previous memoir, Little Brother, was published by Sarabande Books in 2022. Her short story, "What I Learned From Fat Annie" won the Thomas Wolfe Fiction Prize in 2023 and the story "How Daddy Lost His Ear," from her forthcoming short story collection How Daddy Lost His Ear and Other Stories (September 23, 2025), received second prize in the 2023 Sean O’Faolain Short Story Competition.

She is an active and involved feminist, working for women’s empowerment, who founded the Kentucky Foundation for Women, which gives grants to Kentucky artists and writers who are feminists, The Sallie Bingham Center for Women's History and Culture at Duke University, and the Women’s Project and Productions in New York City. She lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Sallie's complete biography is available here.

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Taken By The Shawnee

Taken By The Shawnee

July 6th, 2025
Sallie Bingham introduces and reads from her latest work, Taken by the Shawnee.
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