Opening Speech of the 2024 Independent National Convention

Below is the transcript for Sky Gardner’s speech at the Independent National Convention in Denver, Colorado on September 17th, 2024, Video link coming soon…

Welcome all, I come to you as a representative of the young people of America with eyes looking out towards the horizon of a better future. For many young people today the landscape of America looks bleak, stained by the decisions of those in power leaving us not with hope but with disorder. I speak here today because when everything else has felt hopeless, the independent movement promises a different path that I believe has the potential to uplift my whole generation. 

On March 11 2020 I was told to stay inside and not go back to school. I didn’t have too many objections, I thought it was the beginning of a nice, early vacation. But what was meant to be several weeks turned to 6 weeks and then to 6 months. Still, the panic compelling parents to keep children inside never reached me or many of my friends. Instead we found our own ways to pass the time. As the months went by some of my friends stopped calling me and settled into the complete isolation that the pandemic secured for us- others called me every day, during class or otherwise, to fill the gaps of socialization online. We were happy to replace time outdoors with our device. What I didn’t realize though, is that what I thought was my vacation was actually an alteration of the rest of my life. My quiet isolation was paving a subtle deterioration of a necessary part of growing up: socialization.

The deterioration came in waves of mental health shifts and in the transitions our brains were making as it adapted to the new way of living. And although I felt normal, if not more relaxed than the years preceding the pandemic, 53% of youth feeling disconnected from the world were in a constant state of hopelessness- and 26% of those kids were thinking about suicide. In our “vacation” CNN reported that 1 in 13 children went through 4 adverse or traumatizing events over COVID-19, either digitally or in their own home. 1 in 13 children were experiencing domestic trauma, relationship abuse, digital abuse or parents losing jobs. This was not a vacation, it was a rerouting of young society. 

Studies archived in the National Library of Medicine show that lockdown brought unbalance in young people's EQ levels. Whilst we actually grew stronger as a generation in our abilities to have general empathy and being able to see the world through different point of views, likely through an overwhelming focus on the far reaches of our devices, our intrinsic social empathy decreased. We don't have the same intuitive understanding of the people around as we used to. The NCBI published a test given to young people pre and post pandemic to see how well they could infer one another's mental states based off of looking into their eyes. They discovered that when looking at someone, individuals post pandemic could not identify each other's emotions as well as prior to being isolated.  Our ability to internalize emotional cues from our peers weakened. 

The nature of human understanding among young people is no longer the same. Second graders who had never even been to a school before were unsure what to do with other people. We’ve been set back and the experience of community has completely altered. Going to soccer practice means being part of a community but so does this. (*Raise cellphone*) I, along with everyone else, had been locked inside of our houses with nothing but a downpour of social media. Everyone had been pushed to get in touch with the experiences of the rest of the world but we still found ourselves unsure of what to do with any of this knowledge. We had simultaneously retreated into ourselves and been exposed to more of this world than we'd ever been before. 

When the lockdown ended and I went back to school there was a new boundary between ourselves and our peers. There were layers added to self expression and we unintentionally all distanced ourselves from one another. We missed certain key years of figuring out who we are within the whole of our communities and what distinguishes us from people around us. This disjunction has made society uncomfortable being face to face. After the lockdown, more young people were found to identify themselves with fictional characters more than any year prior to it. The pandemic created a world where society was enclosed behind a screen, a wall was constantly provided for us and we no longer have that and it feels unnatural. 

To try and remember what life was like before the pandemic I traced my steps back a couple years to a community that my father had belonged to. ^ As a child my home used to be a place of spiritual practice. Weekly meditations took place in our living room with people I knew and didn’t know and Sunday was when we drove up to a temple devoted to the practices of the Indian-American monk Paramahansa Yogananda. I never felt myself drawn to religion so much but what I did feel was important from my many classes of the various teachings of Yogananda was the stress on one thing: humanity's intrinsic nature of oneness. Within his teachings there was no separation between man or woman, seedling or animal, oligarch or farmer. To be connected was not to look the same or act the same but to see one another on a level separate from the physical. 

The key to connection was intentional, in depth understanding of one another- which was exactly what the lock down removed from our daily practice. 

So how do we reconfigure ourselves back together? How do we take the habits of solitude and morph them into a skill for connection? How are we brought back to our intrinsic oneness? We must return to the common ground of humanity: love. Despite the drastic changes that the pandemic brought to the way we connect, our need and desire for connection wasn’t gone. We got quieter about it, sure, but it had silently increased tenfold. With no screens, romantic relationships were turned back on, but we were already unsure about how to go about our relationships and now we had to rediscover interaction as a whole. The social empathy that had been diluted only enhanced our regular confusion about how to care for and be cared for by another person. The amalgamation of separation and youth made us approach relationships more cautiously than we ever had before. We knew we needed to connect but how do that- we had no idea.

The first year together many of us still wore masks in class so in the beginning all we had to find out who we were to each other was the color of our eyes and the sounds of our voices. Connection was intimately limited. As we got a sense of who we were we became more comfortable and slowly started to fill in the gaps but I felt like something was still missing. After going through relationships myself after COVID I began to realize how little we really understood one another. The problems in our relationships stemmed from the same thing that divides us now as a greater people: confusion of something unfamiliar and a defensiveness in response to that foreign feeling. We would conflict with our partner and, without understanding why the conflict happened, shut down as a resolution. We responded only to what we could see in front of us.

All any of us want to do is love but we get lost in the external clutter. What we see is not reality, it is what we feel. Each of our worlds are shaped to our individual perception- to discover each other is to understand the real intricacies. I’ve been learning this more and more everyday- so 1 year ago I put pen to paper and began to write. – I had been slowly putting the pieces together of what I was learning and finally they started fitting. Acknowledging that I was so young I knew I didn’t have all the answers- but I did know one thing that no adult could tell us: I knew exactly what my peers were feeling. And I knew that we weren't bad partners, we were confused ones.

Teenagers are not careless people- all we do is think and examine the world around us. We seek to find our place amongst the rest so to do that we must discover who we are. We do that through our relationships, but to have those relationships we have to figure out who we are in them. So I turned towards the self, I wrote, “Know who you are! Know what you mean to you.” For to be stable within yourself is to open up a window of passionate curiosity to the rest of the world- a necessary curiosity for love. Love then came next, I dove into every stage of it, the problems and their solutions. No matter what I was talking about it all came back to the same idea: seek to see more. Seek to listen more intentionally; seek to find out each other's stories. When your partner angers, seek to befriend the anger, not join in on the battle. When your partner cries seek to retrace the place of which the tears really flow from. When your partner rejects what you’re saying with defensiveness, don't match the bearing of arms, push it down and seek the tenderness that they need. Seek to see everything that is not being said and seek to hold it gingerly in your palms and love it.

This love is not just necessary for our bonds but it is also imperative for our politics. The action of seeking is the gift of humanity. We thrive off of stories. We dream in stories, we love in stories, we are shaped from our stories and we know our lineage through stories. We have the ability to seek something beyond the necessities of survival that surpasses any other species on this planet. Our might is not our power but our thriving imagination. Imagination built cities, imagination cultivated marriages, imagination founded invention. Imagination drove the callused hands that built Rome and is the gavel in the courts. We seek unique growth and to embrace that and to nurture that skill is what fosters exceptional human connection. We have a gift that can bridge any gap but we must use it to do so.

The independent movement is built on the principles of this humility, curiosity, love, human connection and sustainability. -No matter why you believe we are here, we are here and we may create exceptional love, but that starts with curiosity. The pandemic and our political landscape has set young people back, but love is the common ground and we can find it. May empathy be the gavel in the courts, may curiosity build the next pillars of our nation and may love carry us forward into the future!

I hope to be one of the people that leads that journey. Thank you.