An Interview with Mary Oakes, Activate Maine’s High School Intern

Karen Levine Egee

Oak Tree

Meet Mary Oakes, Our New Intern!

Mary is a high school senior. She has been interested in politics for a long time — and aims to study political science or similar, in college in 2026. Our conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.

How did you get interested in politics, Mary?

I’ve always naturally been a really passionate person. When I hear about an issue, I want to get educated on it and make sure that I know everything about it and try and to come to a stance on it that I think is the most ethical one. I naturally fell into politics by just being passionate about pretty much everything that I hear about!

Do you remember one of the first political issues you felt passionate about?

I think maybe one of the earliest would have been queer rights. You know, I am a queer person. I started learning that when I was about 11 or 12 years old. And I learned about the history of the queer rights movement and the challenges that queer people are facing.

I think I also, early on, started becoming passionate about climate justice, especially growing up here in Maine. Even in my lifetime — and I haven't been alive very long — I've seen such drastic changes to our environment. The Gulf of Maine is warming at a much more rapid pace than a lot of the rest of the world. I’ve seen in just the past 10 years, the snowfall every year has gone from, you know, several feet — it would be up to my head as a little seven-year-old — and nowadays, we're almost at the end of November and haven't really had a proper snowfall.

At 11 or 12, you were already passionate about rights, a social justice issue. Were you the kid on the playground always settling arguments?

Oh, I was maybe not settling arguments, but definitely having them!

I've always been sort of the person who's very talkative in class. I didn't know this when I was younger, but I am autistic, and obviously was back then and sort of struggled with interacting with kids outside of the classroom. But I found that the structured conversation environment of the classroom is very good to me. And so I would talk a lot in class and then sort of be quiet outside of class.

I think that being so active in the classroom also maybe helped contribute to me being so motivated politically. I would have these debates. I would ask the teachers questions, and I was very questioning of authority. I would maybe annoy my teacher sometimes by continuously digging deeper and asking these questions. But I'm glad I did that, and I'm glad it became part of my personality — to dig deeper and really get to the root of things.

Did you want to talk about growing up in Maine?

I did. I think it's such a big part of my identity. I love this state and I think that growing up in this state, with all of my different intersecting identities and ideas, that I have a lot of experiences that are very shaped by having them in this state.

I have a lot of hope for the future of Maine, and I love being a Mainer.  Even if I go to college in a different state, as soon as I can, I'll move back here.

Is there a special contribution you think young people are making, or could make, to this current fight to save democracy and fend off autocracy?

I think there are a lot of contributions we have to make. As young people, we have to step up to the plate now. And the older people who have been leading this movement for such a long time — some of them who have even been through the civil rights movement — we definitely, really, really appreciate those people and hope  they continue to help us through. But we also want people to pass down the torch. We want young people who will make contributions and keep the fight going for a long time.

I think of new perspectives and ideas that might be more difficult for older people to see. When you've been entrenched in an issue for so long, or are you have had a certain idea for so long, it could be difficult to come up with a new idea or solution. I think that can be a place where young people can come in and we can try to come up with new.

You started the Debate and Student Activism Club in your high school. What is that?

The Debate and Student Activism Club was originally just a debate club, actually. I started it as definitely a non-traditional debate club, because there's the traditional debate team, with the competition aspect of it, and you're assigned a side that you have to argue for. But I wanted to present this alternate idea of what debate is, and what debate could be. I think that when we think about debate in terms of a conversation that we have with each other to try to come up with new solutions and to understand and respect each other's perspectives, it could be something much more productive than an argument where people win or lose.

I think talking about our ideas and understanding each other’s’ perspectives is very important. One of the reasons I founded the club is that I feel like teenagers exist in kind of a weird space where we are coming into our own perspectives and having these ideas, but we don't often have a good place to express them. We can express them on social media and then comments come toward us from various directions — and it's just not very productive. A lot of the time, teenagers can't really express their honest opinions, you know, around the family dinner table for fear of being punished for what they think. In the classroom, we're mostly not encouraged to really talk about these controversial issues either.  

So I thought it was important to have sort of this forum where we can have conversations. And then, as we were having our conversations and having our passionate debates about these topics, it became increasingly clear that my club members and I weren't content to just talk about it. You need action, you need to not just express it in words, but express it by doing something about it, by trying to have an impact on your community and the people around you. And I think also we pivoted to student activism a little bit because of frustrations that I saw at the high school, you know, frustration around different policies at the high school. We want to make change in our broader community and also just within our school.

It was a very interesting journey from just the debate club to a student activism club also and still maintaining that debate club element. Now we're doing a lot of different things: We’re organizing events and trying to fundraise for those events.

You were saying that at your high school they discourage talking about politics. But is the school supportive of the Debate and Student Activism Club?

Yes, they are supportive of the club. I didn’t mean it is a rule that we can't talk about politics in a classroom ever.  And I actually am in an AP government and politics class right now. And there is a Current Issues class. So there are certain classroom environments where it is encouraged to talk about political issues. But I think just generally, if you're not in one of these classes, it can be very difficult to find any type of environment in school where it's okay to have those conversations.

It is  a really tricky and difficult time to be a teacher right now. There are all of the threats to education and people being mad at teachers for talking about issues like the LGBTQ and just talking about political issues in general. People are very fired up about that. So I think it's a really difficult place to navigate, as a teacher. And I don't necessarily blame teachers or blame schools for being hesitant to let students have those kinds of conversations in the classroom.

But I am very grateful that my school is supportive of having these specific separate environments where talking about politics is encouraged . And that seems like a lovely way to do it, where there is some control over what's talked about and how it's talked about and.

You are going to write some Gen Z, or “Zoomer” blog posts. Will you try to represent your generation, or will you primarily be speaking from your own perspective as a young person?

I think part of it will be that I will try to represent what I think a lot of people in Gen Z feel. I of course interact with people in my own generation a lot in school, and I think that I have a good idea of the mindset of a lot of those people.

But also, I will represent my own ideas and my own perspective. There are a lot of aspects to my perspective. Like we've talked about a bit, the age aspect of it. I think that having a youth perspective is important. I have other aspects of my identity and my perspective as well: that I'm a queer person, that I've experienced food insecurity and homelessness, and that I'm neurodivergent. I hope to use these experiences to help inform people through the blog posts.

What are some specific issues you want to tackle in your blog posts?

I think there are a lot of different issues that young people have very interesting perspectives on and possibly new ideas about. One particular issue that I'm thinking of is gun safety. It's such a complex issue, especially for the state of Maine, where we have such a big hunting culture, and a lot of it isn't based in violence. It's more based on individuals having these family traditions and just wanting to go hunting. And I think it is such a complicated issue, but people often think about it in black and white terms; we should ban guns, or we should have licenses for guns, or you need to completely not do anything about it because of the Second Amendment. There are these few solutions that people have solidified that they think are the only solutions. But I have my own ideas about it: Maybe we slow down the production of guns, especially because gun production is responsible for such a huge amount of the problem, so that slowly over time they're phased out.

One of the things I think that can become a big issue is that it feels very inaccessible sometimes to get into politics. Right. Especially for people who, you know, maybe are more used to the linguistics of the internet or who aren't super well read, don't have the very large vocabulary. I think it's important that those people still have access to education on politics. And I think a lot of people, especially in my generation, are looking for a more honest kind of politics where people are more genuine and less wording things so carefully and trying to do sound academic. And so that's really where the idea of all lowercase came from.

I want to write blog articles in a manner that is hopefully more accessible to younger people, where I use internet linguistics, where I'm a lot more casual, where I'm typing in all lowercase, for example, and using acronyms.

It's such a big thing with my generation of people feeling like the whole industry of politics and sometimes activism even, like they feel like it's very fake, very sometimes unclear or veiled in kind of a lot of language that's not very genuine or straightforward. And I think this can, a lot of the time, lead people down these rabbit holes of conspiracy theories. I think that's very prevalent .

So I'm hoping that through that series, I'll be able to present something that is more honest and genuine while also being informative and hopefully teaching people some things.

You and I talked about a little bit about doing some Boomer–Zoomer blogs together. Are there topics that you think would be interesting to see the differences of perspective?

Definitely we could do one with the economy. I think that is a very human, big part of generational divides. Older people's experience with the economy versus younger people's experience and how there are differences. But there are also a lot of similarities in terms of, for instance, if you grow up poor, you grow up poor. But it may be more and more inaccessible to get out of that, now, to get to middle class. Whereas it used to be, in in my parents' generation, you could start off with the dirt floor and end up with a nice house. Now, I don't think you could. And a lot of people in older generations in general still, maybe have that mindset and think oh, younger generations aren't working hard enough, because I know that when I was there, I worked my way up.

Thank you, Mary, and welcome aboard!

We look forward to working with you!