Jake takes action.

I went ahead and signed the same petition that Marissa had posted a while ago. My reasoning is a little bit different, though. Fracking is not a good thing in its current form. I don't think we should be doing any more destruction with it until we can sort out how exactly to make it work without annihilating our precious earth. My thinking is that if we can get it to stop, then maybe we'll have some time to actually think about what we're doing and how to mitigate the senseless violence.
How does this all tie into democracy? Well, I can choose to sign a petition just as I can choose to vote for the man or woman that most accurately holds my values to be the most important. I think it's important to abolish fracking in its current form, and thus, I can "vote" for just that.
I wrote about social justice issues and how I thought about it in teaching in an earlier write up of an observation I did for class. At the time, I wasn't sure how I felt about it, but I think it's pretty clear to me now that education is a good vessel for spreading messages to students regardless of age. To help them to lean in the direction of something that could improve the world isn't such a bad thing. It's just morally ambiguous. I'm all for it though.