| So long 'Me,' nice knowing you Craig and Marc Kielburger's 'We' message may be corny, but it's catching on Paula Brook Saturday, October 16, 2004 Dear lord, could it be? Could the Me Decade finally be nearing its grubby end, 15 years late? Could that distant whining noise be the last gasp of the Me Generation shuffling peevishly aside to make way for We? It may be premature to pronounce Me dead, but you can't miss the mounting evidence that the times are a-changing. And not only on the Hyatt-riot fringes. You can see it in the mainstream -- in the more than two million online activists working to reform American democracy under the MoveOn banner. And on television, where the latest Sarah McLachlan video puts the artist in the background, in jeans and bare feet, singing World On Fire. In the foreground: scenes illustrating all the good that can be done around the world with the relatively modest $150,000 in video production costs McLachlan has diverted to charity. The song, she explained in a recent interview, is about "remembering that even the smallest gesture can make a difference -- corny but true." The same corny but true message runs through a new book called Me to We, by Craig and Marc Kielburger. It came across my desk in advance of a visit to Vancouver this week by 27-year-old Marc, who is executive director of Free the Children, the international children's aid agency founded nine years ago by his then 12-year-old brother Craig. If you don't remember little Craig Kielburger, you probably didn't have a 12-year-old nine years ago, like I did. Frankly, at the time, I found the story almost impossible to believe: how the spunky Scarborough kid organized a social-action club at his school after reading in the newspaper about the murder of a 12-year-old Pakistani boy who'd been sold into bondage at age five to work in a rug factory. Craig's club lobbied corporations and wrote to governments and spoke at schools around Toronto, and it was all a bit much for a Vancouver mother of typical pre-teen mall rats to digest. We of little faith. That Kielburger kid turned into the pied piper of children's rights, building his club into an international movement of kids helping kids. It now has close to 100,000 members in North America, Europe and Japan, and the clout to influence policy makers and to embarrass running shoe manufacturers and to raise enough money to build schools in developing nations. They started small, just like Sarah McLachlan said. In 1997 they built a one-room schoolhouse for primary-aged children in Nicaragua. Now 300 schools are operating in 21 countries, thanks to Free the Children funds and volunteers. Craig, who went to an alternative high school that gave him the freedom to work and travel, a lot, was on site for many of those school openings, from Bangkok's slums to battle-scarred Kosovo. He has conferred with Nelson Mandela, Mother Teresa, the Dalai Lama and the Pope. He has held forth at the United Nations, and been nominated three times for the Nobel Peace Prize. More importantly, he has charmed the media. After appearing on Oprah three years ago, his daily e-mail jumped from hundreds to thousands, most of them kids wanting to know "what can I do?" Meanwhile, big brother Marc -- no slouch -- was earning a Rhodes Scholarship and Oxford law degree in his spare time while doing what he considered to be the more important work of volunteering in Third World slums and war zones. He is now directing operations for Free the Children while Craig completes his BA in Peace and Conflict Studies at the University of Toronto. Nice boys. Will make great sons-in-law, if you don't mind sharing your daughters with the world. Marc also heads an offshoot organization called Leaders Today, which has been working with school boards and teachers' federations across Canada in the last few years to train and motivate young people to become socially involved. The group's motto is "We are the generation that we have been waiting for." He took this message to senior students at Surrey and Langley high schools this week, as part of a Me to We national tour. He's toting the new book as a tool to rally his young audiences to global action. It's the third in the Kielburgers' series of "active citizenship" guides -- they co-wrote Take Action and Take More Action, which are now mandated as part of the high school Civics curriculum in Ontario. Before that Craig told his own story in an award-winning book called Free the Children, which has been translated into eight languages. But Me to We is quite different from the previous books. It's a (shudder) self-help guide, proposing to help you feel better about yourself by plugging you in to others. Turning self-help on its head is the subtitle, and there are chapters by Richard Gere, Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Oprah Winfrey mixed into the brothers' treatise about the pointlessness of the pursuit of personal happiness. Mild medicine, was my initial impression of Me to We, and I told Marc so when I met him this week. It's not exactly Steal This Book, Abbie Hoffman's iconic 1971 guide to social mayhem, which is my idea of revolutionary, though I admit my ideas are getting a tad hoary. Marc, as clean cut as Hoffman was unkempt, set me straight. The original yippie never gave workshops in high schools, and Steal This Book wasn't endorsed by the Young Presidents' Organization. The Kielburgers (who've got Body Shop founder Anita Roddick on their advisory board) are fighting the system from within. And getting results. As corny as that sounds. Never underestimate the power of corn. Hoffman did, and fizzled out in the '70s, and committed suicide following a drug bust in the '80s. "We need the radicals pushing at the political fringes," Marc told me, "but we also need people in the middle who are able to sit down with a CEO and say, you know why those guys are so upset about the WTO? Here's why. I'm not going to chain myself to your office door -- but I will have a conversation with you." And I reckon you'll listen, and one day soon you'll peevishly step aside. More about the Kielburgers' work at www.freethechildren.com and www.leaderstoday.com |