Young Blood

Election Day, 1992. Mission Hills, Kansas.Sam Stepp sat on the couch in his living room, staring at the TV. A hard-core Republican and political junkie, Stepp loved Election Day even more than a Chiefs game.

As he waited anxiously for polls to close, he thought back on the campaign. President George Bush had been lagging in the polls nationally, but he was popular among Stepp's friends and neighbors in Johnson County. Many of them saw Democratic candidate Bill Clinton exactly as Bush's campaign ads portrayed him: a slick-talking draft dodger from Arkansas with questionable morals who wanted to overtax Americans.

Bush was Clinton's polar opposite: a plainspoken hero who'd fought as a Navy pilot in World War II, a loyal husband and fiscally conservative oil entrepreneur who had proven his mettle by taking on the maniacal Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. Stepp remembered Bush's ads, the ones that showed footage of Scud missiles taken during 1991's Gulf War.

Results began to come in. Stepp watched the map of the country as the networks colored in each state with Republican red or Democrat blue. "Wooo!" Stepp hollered as Florida and the Carolinas turned red. But too many states were going blue -- all-important New York and its neighbors in the Northeast. A stripe of red appeared down the center of the country. Then Stepp watched in agony as California fell to Clinton. It was over.

Devastated, Stepp climbed into bed and stared at the ceiling. One question haunted him. How would he face his second-grade classmates the next day? Ten years later, Washington, D.C.

Sam Stepp stood on the National Mall on a Saturday morning in January 2003, surrounded by a huge crowd of anti-war protesters.

He was there to save the world, along with nine of his friends from Shawnee Mission East High School.

More than thirty kids from four area high schools had made the 24-hour trip in a caravan of three buses carrying 167 people from Kansas City.

As the protesters congregated on the Mall, C-SPAN helicopters hovered above, broadcasting a crowd estimated at 485,000 -- the largest peace rally to take place in Washington since the Vietnam War. "It was more people than I've ever seen in my life," Stepp recalls.

Right after the September 11 attacks, Kansas City's office of the American Friends Service Committee, the social and political arm of the Quakers, had formed the Justice Not Revenge network to promote nonviolent responses at a time when anger dominated the national discussion. At first, the group's meetings drew crowds of fifty or more, including a few high school kids. But as the months passed, that number dwindled to a lonely five or six. And the ones left sitting in the church meeting rooms were mainly older people "who had been doing this [peace activism] forever," says Kris Cheatum, who runs a twenty-year-old local group called Peaceworks. "There were no youngsters at that time."

But as the U.S. government's focus shifted from smoking terrorists out of caves in Afghanistan to bombing people in Iraq, anti-war rallies on the Plaza began to grow. When school started this past fall, more high schoolers started showing up at the J.C. Nichols fountain.

"In recent years, there's been a lot of concern amongst peace activists about the graying of the peace movement," says Kris' husband, Lynn Cheatum. "Now along come these youth, and they're saying the same things we're saying, only with more vigor."

The trip from Kansas City to the D.C. rally had been put together by a 54-year-old ex-English teacher from Olathe, Patrice Cuddy-Lamoree. The most radical thing about her, she says, is that she doesn't put chemicals on her lawn.

When a friend of Stepp's, Julie Wu, heard that Cuddy-Lamoree had arranged for two buses to take Kansas City protesters to the rally, Wu called her and said 47 high school students wanted to go -- almost enough to fill a third bus.

"I was like, yeah, right, high school kids, 47, we'll see," Cuddy-Lamoree says. Then she met with a small group of girls: Wu, from Shawnee Mission East; Genevie Gold, from Sumner Academy in Kansas City, Kansas; Zaria Molini, from Notre Dame de Sion in south Kansas City; and Margaret Hansbrough, from St. Teresa's Academy in Brookside.

"Those four girls, they're little leaders," Cuddy-Lamoree says now. She reserved a third bus.

Thinking that high schoolers would feel more comfortable among their own kind, Cuddy-Lamoree designated the third vehicle "the kids' bus." "As a teacher, I've been around high school kids," she says. "They need each other."

Being teen-agers, most of the kids were used to ignoring minor insults from adults.

When Stepp found out about the kids' bus, he e-mailed Cuddy-Lamoree and asked if he could ride in one of the other buses. "I already knew all those people," Sam says of his fellow high schoolers. "I wanted to meet new people and exchange some new ideas." Cuddy-Lamoree let him ride on Bus No. 1, where he ended up befriending two nuns.

Nan Thrutchley, a Republican from Olathe who had never protested anything before, helped organize the trip. "Nan's [kids] wanted to go, so she decided to go, too," Cuddy-Lamoree says.