Animal rights conferences have always been key to my development as an activist; from inspiration to education, they have helped me do more for the animals than I ever could have done alone. The national animal rights conference, Animal Rights 2001 (AR2001), in Washington DC was the start of my activism and, in my eyes, perfect in every capacity but one: I couldn’t find a single person anywhere near my 14 years of age. It was not the only time that my youth would make me feel alone in the movement, and for the next half year it seemed a near impossibility that I would find any activists even close to me in age before I turned twenty, and even then I might be hard-put. Then, flipping through Veg News one day, I discovered on the international calendar something that proved my pessimistic hypothesis utterly, but happily, wrong.
My heart leapt as I read the announcement. The Student Animal Rights Alliance (SARA), which had just been founded within the past year, was holding a conference just for students. Liberation Now!, which was to take place that February, was specifically geared toward helping young people become and stay active in animal rights. At the website, I began to discover just how great this conference was going to be.
Liberationnow.org revealed just how much this event was designed specifically for the starving student. Primarily, the registration fee was just $10…cheap enough even for me to afford without breaking my meager bank account or bugging my mother to pick up the extra. I knew that for my college friends, who didn’t have a generous parent to fall back on, this would be a godsend. Also, anyone who couldn’t find a ride down could apply for a travel grant—something else with which I could sympathize. Without a car, and with Amtrak tickets from my home in NJ to the conference in DC costing in the area of $300, this could have made a world of difference. (In the end, though, I found an alternate source of transport: other students, apparently overjoyed at the opportunity to attend such an event, arranged for a $25 bus down from NYC, which I was able to take.) The only challenge proved to be housing, but this was not a huge problem. The website provided several suggestions, among them rooming with college students at American University, the place where the conference was being held, and staying in a nearby hotel, sharing with other attendees to bring down the cost. Since my sister and her friends were, coincidentally, sightseeing in DC at the same time, I decided to stay with them. Later, however, I found this to be a mistake: the hotel was across town, necessitating an hour's metro ride comlete with a transfer between train lines. At future conferences, I learned, I should reserve a hotel nearby, so as to avoid this unwieldy situation.
So I set out for Liberation Now!, the Student Animal Rights Conference.
I admit to having some trepidation on my way down. AR2001 had seemed so well-known and official, organized by a long-standing animal rights group. This conference was being run by a brand-new organization, and with a price one-fourteenth that of the other one. Would it be organized, or a complete chaotic mess? On such a tight budget, could the speakers possibly be anywhere near as incredible and inspirational as those at the other conference I had attended? Also, would it be too geared toward students? My experience with events for “children” was coloring books and high-pitched voices . . . I hoped not to find condescending adults ready to teach classes and yell at “disobedient” students. My first animal rights conference had been so exceptional . . . how could this one possibly measure up?
The first night was a staggering success. After a very orderly check-in, I found myself in a crowded room surrounded by other enthusiastic young people—young, vegan people. Just as at AR2001, I was immersed in a feeling of instant vegan camaraderie, but this time I never felt unsure about whether I should use a person’s first or last name. Some people were new to animal rights, taking a first glance into this world of compassion, others experienced, with many campaigns and protests to their names. We dove into Carol Adams’s famous Sexual Politics of Meat slideshow, then watched Mercy for Animals’s open rescue documentation, Hope for the Hopeless. We finished out the night with piles of cookies, good music, and a surprisingly fun icebreaker. When my sister and her friends came to get me, I was bubbling over with enthusiasm and excitement, eager to share with them everything that I’d learned that evening. Night One had proved even more wonderful than I could possibly have hoped.
The rest of the conference continued with the same energetic air. The speakers, some of whom were the same as those I had seen at AR2001, lit fires beneath us and filled us with inspiration and will to continue our fight on behalf of the animals. Our registration covered meals for each day—vegan, of course!—and tables in the hallways offered inexpensive snacks in between. A schedule laid out when each of a plethora of exciting and educational sessions was to take place, where nationally recognized activists taught us methods of activism from early in the morning until late at night. And throughout it all were the people. Young and invigorated, mature enough to have intelligent discussions on what tactics would best help our movement, but not so old as to be stodgy and detached. The first morning, for example, those bold enough to get up for a nine o’ clock session tried lying on their backs with their feet in the air to help wake up more thoroughly. And just about everyone was was vegetarian or vegan. I remember the incredible feeling of kinship when, in a session on open rescues, we were watching news coverage on Compassion Over Killing's first rescue and the reporter said, in reference to the rescuers, "the members of this organization, who do not eat meat . . ." The room let out a small explosion of incredulous laughter, as if to say, "of course not!" and, "not just meat, but no dairy or eggs, either!" It gave a sensation of complete fitting-in, something so essential to young adults.
Near the end, we reached a climax of energy as nearly everyone present attended a huge Neiman Marcus protest. For hours we marched with signs, chanting anti-fur slogans. As we paraded, forming a huge oval in front of the store, someone in the middle would call out, “Stop the torture, stop the pain!” or another cry against the store, and we would reply with the appropriate response— in the case of this one, “Neiman Marcus is to blame!” To finish, we arranged ourselves sitting down before the front doors, forming a sea of dedicated young men and women against animal cruelty.
So I found that Liberation Now! 2004 fulfilled even my wildest dreams of a wonderful conference. It wasn’t too juvenile; it didn’t treat us like “children.” But at the same time it conformed perfectly to our needs and desires: low cost of registration, sessions on how to deal with schools, a community of people our own age. It was organized and inspirational, with powerful and knowledgeable speakers who were simply amazing. Some people were new to the movement, taking their first tentative steps into vegetarian or veganism. They could not have had a better introduction. Others had been vegan activists for years, already all too familiar with the cruel exploitation of animals that is so horribly prevelant in the world and experienced in ways to help stop it. For them, it was a place to recharge and learn even more methods of dealing with cruel industries. I fell somewhere in between, and the conference fulfilled my needs perfectly, as well. And no matter how long each of us had been involved in animal rights, it was refreshing and rejuvenating to be in a pool of people who shared both our youth and beliefs about compassion. We could talk about school, about parents . . . and about not having vegan friends our own ages. Except now, we did.
--Melissa is a long-time vegan and an award-winning animal rights activist
