Cramm This Intro

I was twelve years old when I decided I needed to change the world.

Or maybe decided isn't the right word. It wasn't like I woke up one day and just went, "There are a lot of problems in the world. I should probably do something." No, there was a greater shift taking place.

It was the shift from feeling safe and secure within my country . . . to feeling both the absolute and urgent need to do something and the utter helplessness that comes with believing you're too young and your voice is too small to do much of anything. That shift happened with the 2016 US presidential election.

I'll be honest: before that election, politics rarely crossed my mind. I watched the news each night with my parents, and I certainly had big opinions about a lot of what was going on, but I never saw myself as being directly impacted by anything I watched. And I know I wasn't alone in that feeling.

Like so many of my peers, I had been part of the American school system since kindergarten, and thus I had been raised on the idea that the United States of America was simply better. We brought democracy to the world, we fought for the freedom of our people and others, we were economically and politically superior, we were a melting pot of immigrants from all over the planet, and so on. This was the world that I saw and the world that I was taught about, andfrom my position of relative privilege, it all made perfect sense.

I was raised Jewish, the great-granddaughter of family who were forced to flee the Soviet Union in the 1930s due to the pogroms--mass killing of Jews--and who eventually made their way as immigrants to Mexico, and then finally the US. So I knew that antisemitism was real, but I had never experienced it directly, or even had awareness that it was a problem that continued to exist in America. Along with many other Americans, I believed it had been vanquished with the Nazis. I knew of the Ku Klux Klan and neo-Nazi groups, but I was convinced that these were isolated cases, extremists who had no real influence on society. I was white, I was comfortable, and while I knew that our country and our world had some problems, I also had never really experienced them up close and personal.

In 2016, everything changed.

I'll set the scene. It was the day after the election, and everyone was in a bit of a daze. The majority of the students at my junior high school were Latinx, and many of their parents were undocumented immigrants.

For the first time in my life, I saw how what was happening in our government was deeply personal to me and everyone else at my school. If you weren't the child of an undocumented immigrant, you knew someone who was or were friends with someone who did. The whispered conversations about what would happen if somebody's mother or father was deported were unavoidable. The fear hung heavy in the air for weeks following the election.

It was all we could talk about.

Around the same time, my parents sat down with my younger brother and me to discuss recent reports of antisemitic acts in the United States. One such act was the spray-painting of swastikas and antisemitic language in a New York subway station. The image of a graffitied Jews belong in the oven was forever imprinted in my mind.

Which brings me to that overwhelming sense of helplessness I mentioned earlier. I had quickly but forcefully grown deeply disillusioned, and I was desperate to do something--anything--to make things right.

But for all that desperation, I truly had no idea where to start. And not just that--I had no idea how to even think about where to start. I was twelve years old, far too young to vote or get involved with an existing organization in any meaningful way. I felt entirely locked out of conventional systems of changemaking.

I dealt with this frustration by having long conversations with my friends about the news and politics. And that's when I noticed something: while my generation was talking about these things, none of us were really reading or watching any form of traditional news. It wasn't hard to understand why: traditional media is primarily created by older generations who just don't have younger readers in mind when writing the news. Try watching the news and you'll see ads for things like fighting hair loss--not really an issue for Generation Z.

I immediately identified this as a huge problem. Every day, something happens in the world that impacts countless lives. And if we don't know about these things, we're doing a serious disservice to the people who most need our help.

I knew what I had to do. One evening in January of 2017, I locked myself in a room at home and spent the next few hours researching the news and rewriting it in a way that spoke to Generation Z.

A week later, I bought the domain name thecramm.com with money from my thirteenth birthday. (The name "The Cramm" came from cramming the news into one newsletter and also referenced how students cram the night before a test--but with The Cramm, they wouldn't need to cram for the news.) A week after that, I hit send on the first of what became hundreds of newsletters detailing the news of the day in language that was engaging and digestible and, most importantly, connected to my generation. 

The reaction was beyond my wildest hopes and dreams. Our newsletters, which we now send out through our website, email, text, social media, and a podcast, rake up millions of views each month. Our readers hail from over one hundred countries on six continents. I constantly receive emails from Gen Zers who tell me that something they read in The Cramm inspired them to take action and make a difference. Our readers are organizing marches and rallies, creating clubs, getting involved in charities, voting, raising awareness about the issues that matter, talking about politics with their friends--the list goes on.

As I spent more and more time distilling the news into a five-minute read, I began to recognize more and more problems with traditional media. High among them is the belief that most--if not all--of the consumers of any given news source are of an older generation that has perhaps lived through certain events that my generation has not. This leads to an expectation that anyone reading or tuning in has existing knowledge of certain issues, events, and topics, simply based on having lived through them.

While that might not be an issue for older generations, my generation, for the most part, lacks this existing knowledge, and I was constantly having to do extra research on events that had taken place years earlier just to get through a story on something happening today.

But of course, most everything that goes on in our news and politics today is tied to history. It's hard to get a grasp on the hardships marginalized people/groups face in everyday life without understanding the complex ways in which issues like racism and homophobia have manifested over time. It's hard to get a grasp on the current relationship between the US and Russia without understanding the Cold War. It's hard to get a grasp on the current situation in the Middle East without understanding the Arab Spring revolutions or the history of the Israel-Palestine conflict. It's hard to get a grasp on the Black Lives Matter movement without understanding the civil rights movement and all that it accomplished--and all that has yet to be accomplished. And it's hard to get a grasp on the future of climate change without understanding how it not only is devastating the world today through things like wildfires and hurricanes, but has also been doing damage for decades.

Understanding these events and issues is crucial to understanding the world as it is today.

So, once again, I found myself doing the very same thing I did in 2017: I locked myself in my room. I opened my computer.

And I began to type.

The result is this book, which I hope forces you to reckon with not only the state of our world today, but also how and why it came to be this way. I hope it empowers you and inspires you to take the future into your own hands.

And, above all, I hope it gives you the insight you need to ensure that history doesn't repeat itself--and to dismantle or improve the systems that have allowed so many of our worst prejudices to continue to thrive and to impact the forces that have caused such devastation to occur.

Because, after all: you can't change the world unless you know about it.

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Excerpted from Cramm This Book: So You Know WTF Is Going on in the World Today by Olivia Seltzer
All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.