Sun Youth Forum: Tomorrow’s voices heard today

Our future looks bright.

That’s because our present — represented by Clark County high school students — is full of the bright, thoughtful and caring promise that is a requirement for tomorrow’s progress.

I refer, of course, to the Las Vegas Sun Youth Forum. This year Cimaron-Memorial High School and its principal, Colin McNaught, provided the space and the Clark County School District provided the time for our community’s best and brightest students to meet, discuss, challenge each other and form consensus around topics critical to today’s challenges and necessary to resolve for all of their tomorrows.

When my father, Hank Greenspun, and Ruthe Deskin, his far more than able assistant in those very early days, convinced Harvey Dondero, who represented the Clark County School District in the 1950s that high school students not only needed a forum to be heard but a community willing to listen to them, the SunYouth Forum was born.

And for the past 66 years — longer than any other such program in the country, if any even exist today — the Sun Youth Forum has kept that promise.

Monday, more than 600 of the county’s best and brightest students met to discuss what was on their minds across the broadest range of topics, from the international to the local and everything in between.

And thanks to the largest group of adult moderators yet, who volunteer each year for what is the “best day” of their year, I believe we witnessed the “best” Sun Youth Forum yet.

The students did their job. Now it is up to the rest of this community to do ours. And that is to listen to the voices of our young people and to pay them heed.

Thanks to our partners at Vegas PBS, NPR, UNLV-TV, KUNV Radio, the Las Vegas Sun and our sister publications and websites, there will be no shortage of opportunity to hear what the young people are saying to their elders.

And, as you might imagine, this year they have a lot to say.

As I witnessed in room after room, the students were engaged, respectful and mindful that their ideas and opinions were not fully shared by their colleagues from other schools, other walks of life and other dramatically different circumstances. But one point was clear and so very refreshing, and that is the way the students addressed one another. They listened and they reacted respectfully and with facts — not the made-up kind that permeate the internet and our “news” channels but the kind that have stood the test of time. You know, just the facts, ma’am.

And that brings me to the room of first-time moderator Qiava Martinez, which was discussing exactly that topic.

Since the young people are the first to be victimized by an internet full of lies and deception designed to manipulate them with false narratives leading to wrongheaded reactions — their words, not mine — they were looking for ways to “fix” the problem so that their younger brothers and sisters (and, yes, their parents and grandparents who have no idea what they are talking about) would not also fall victim.

It surprised me and pleased me that when the first Sun Youth Forum participant suggested Section 230 as a likely first step toward sanity, almost the entire room immediately agreed.

First, they knew what Section 230 was when I dare say their parents would be clueless. And second, that there was immediate consensus that holding people responsible for their actions was a good idea.

Section 230 is a section of the Communications Decency Act of 1996, a federal law that was passed in an effort to allow a brand new internet to grow without constraint. Today, the idea that Google and Facebook and Twitter (X) and all the others can pass on the most fallacious and vile and criminally encouraging ideas to unsuspecting minors and adults without any responsibility for doing so, is anathema to these kids.

And since they are the real victims, as is their future in this democracy, I should think that their concerns should be ours. Forget the lobbyists paid for by the giant platform companies to keep their good thing going — which means their ability to make money by turning Americans against each other without regard to the facts and common decency — it is time for us to listen to the voices of tomorrow.

They are the people who will have to live with the consequences so they have the most at stake.

I mention that discussion as just one of many I heard that day. And I understand that it was in a room of 17- and 18-year olds when it should have been in a room full of their parents and grandparents. But it wasn’t and it hasn’t been.

But that’s the beauty of the Sun Youth Forum. We can see where our country is going because those students will be leading the way.

As my father wrote generations ago, “Listen to youth, for theirs is a wisdom untainted by cynicism, unbounded by pessimism and full of bright hope for the future.”

Brian Greenspun is editor, publisher and owner of the Sun.