STAY SOLID!

A Radical Youth Handbook

I edited this book with a collective of folks from the Purple Thistle Centre. It is a scrapbook-style collection of ideas and stories, information, advice, and encouragement to stay solid and build a good life in a crazy world. Mostly it is an argument for a different, better kind of world – coming from more than 150 voices.

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So much of our culture insists that young people give up their ethics, forget their dreams, do what they are told, eat dominant ideology, accept that the world sucks and believe that oppression is natural. We want to fight this. We want you (and us!) to stay radical, keep asking hard questions, keep resisting, keep fighting the good fight, and keep trying to be a good person leading a thoughtful, generous, fun life. We want to talk about having real values and an ethical worldview, about how to keep doing the things that really matter to us. We really believe that none of us have to have a boring, depressing, defeated life—not now, not ever. We all have to compromise all the time and that’s a good thing, but we want to support and exhort kids to hang on to their best values and build a good life, not one that we meekly accept because we can’t think of a different way.

From dealing with the cops to dealing with your peers, from school and community to drugs and sex, from race and class to money and mental health, Stay Solid! provides essential support for radically inclined teens who believe that it’s possible for all of us to hang on to our values and build a life we believe in.
Stay Solid! is for kids everywhere, and for anyone who considers themselves an ally—parents, teachers, neighbors, friends, relatives, and beyond.
Contributors include: Michael Hardt, Michelle Alexander, The Guerilla Girls, Sunaura Taylor, Ward Churchill, Mike Davis, Andrea Smith, Lisa Gray-Garcia, Carmen Aguirre, Margaret Killjoy, Dan Savage and many, many, many others.