Leading from a Place of Tomorrow is necessary in ethical leadership.

Anything that I do in advocacy work, I do from a place of tomorrow. Not “How will this affect me now, but how will this affect the people after me?” Leading from a place of now is selfish and self-centered. Making ourselves comfortable now at the expense of the next generation is Disney Villain Behavior and morally and ethically bankrupt.

It’s troubling to see older generations upset at the millennials for having a moral compass.

Yes, we were taught that monopolies were bad, so no, we don’t want to see a diluted industry become the illusion of choice. Yes, we want clean water. No, we don’t need to cartoonify ourselves at the expense of dwindling fresh water and the slopification of creative industry. Yes, we want clean air today, tomorrow, and every day after. There is no amount of money that could make me waver on those core values. I value the Earth, and despite what corporations will tell you, we don’t own the Earth. We’re renting it, and Mother Earth is showing us just that in the form of global warming and catastrophic events.

As a kid, I would sit at the kitchen table drinking Folgers with my pap-pap reading the newspaper, and he would tell me stories of the past. Yes, the air in Braddock is cleaner than it used to be. No, we can’t feel the black soot on our house and cars, but that should never be the bar. The bar should be lowering asthma cases in the community, decreasing the bad air quality days, and holding polluters accountable. There should be a number that gives corporations the go-ahead to chip away at our quality of life and life expectancy. Corporations aren’t people with feelings, jobs, and life expectancies. Instead, they run on bottom lines, bonuses, and reputations. This is where the generations before us went wrong. You can’t buy the air, but you surely can pay to have people ignore that you’re destroying it.

The millennial activists and the ones after us have nothing to lose when advocating because they’re inheriting the worst job market, inflation, decreased quality of life, and delayed independence because of the housing crisis (no corporation needs to own an entire block). When young people advocate, especially young black people, we advocate for everyone after us because that’s on sustainability and making change for good.