The Youth Liberation Front is not a central committee, a vanguard of intellectually-advanced leaders, or an elite group of honor-rollers who won the annual popularity contest. It is a battle cry, an acronym carved into a desk, a whisper between comrades passing in the hall. It is chanted by inmates in juvenile halls rioting against an abusive and illegitimate institution. It is a silk-screened patch sewn on the knap sacks of young hobos, bums and punks. It is carved into the baseball bat that cracks the skull of the long-since parent-turned-abuser. It is a tattoo worn by a grrl no longer willing to hate herself. It is a phrase that sends kids to the psyche ward, and sympathetic teachers to the unemployment line.

It is the seductive kiss that turns 4.0 GPA's into molotov cocktails and barricades. It is the reluctantly-embraced struggle taken up by those raised in strict doctrines of obedience and dicipline, long held sacred as tools of resistance and empowerment. It is the support and solidarity we give each other, tangibly and emotionally, in both the struggle and in day to day life. It is the inspiration for kids to get off drugs (i.e. rydalin) despite the efforts of their pimps (i.e. parents) to trick them out to all their clients (i.e. teachers, extra-curricular activities, their society of friends, and the next eligable young man or woman they've got lined up for you). It is the ire of parents, priests, principals, professors, and pundits. It is the joyful shout of an intraverted quiet kid as s/he takes a risk that defies all pre-concieved notions of social norms, and is in return presented with something long-coveted. It is the solemn mutter of the most witty, unapproachable class clown, eyes pregnant with tears.

It is an unapologetic raised fist in a world where we are not even allow to raise from our seat to go to the restroom without permission. It is the lone revolutionary still fighting a guerilla war against a totalitarian state that has long since been the victor. It is yet another movement of livestock that declares its individual soveregnty, rather than remain someone else's property to be used as bargaining chips or status symbols. It is the clique that smashes the boundaries of all other cliques, that celebrates our diversity, rather than dividing us up based on our sizes, tastes, unique abilities, sexual identities and preferences, classes, colors, creeds, and ages - for it is our division that makes us the most vulnerable to those in charge. It is a name that will echo in history as the banner that was raised by the most intimately of the oppressed of this or any other society. It is the simple declaration that ultimately we know whats best for us, though sometimes we need some support, guidance, and most importantly, unconditional love.

It will be the destruction of the nuclear family until our parents, who we love, can come to treat us as equals, just as the feminist movement has demanded of its male lovers. Conflict with those who have nurtured us and made us who we are is not a battle most of us want to fight, but for all of us, in one form or another, it is the only way to liberation.

This is only the beginning.