The missing political generation

[Thomas Widrow]

The missing political youth: Has my generation f-f-f-f-faded away?
by Thomas Widrow

In 1965, a rock-and-roll band named The Who recorded a song that would become an international anthem for the youngest generations who wished that the older ones would f*** off (Shmoop Editorial Team, 2008). It voiced the frustration, despair and anger that almost every under-twenty-fiver has felt. And it ended with smashing guitars, which is always a welcomed touch.

Pretty silent and pretty invisible

Unlike my own generation (those born since the early 1990s), The Who’s generation was able to organize socially and politically to impact the world they were to live in. In Europe alone during the second half of the 1960s, youth protests occurred in roughly ten countries on both sides of the Iron Curtain (Carter, Clark and Randle, 2006). They were fighting for or defending things like freedom, equality and democracy. Later on in 1970, the youth in America completely paralyzed 500 campuses across the country in protest of the Vietnam War (Wells). The young valued life over victory. And for the record, the army eventually pulled out of Vietnam, losing the war but saving lives.

Meanwhile, my own generation sounds pretty silent and looks pretty invisible. Mind you, I am not talking about the youth in Northern Africa, who took their democratic cravings to the streets, and then got killed for it while we turned a blind eye (Slackman, 2011). I’m not referring to the youth in Hong Kong, who during the Umbrella Revolution tried to defend democracy and were imprisoned for doing so (Tsoi and Allen-Ebrahimian, 2014).

I’m talking about those of us who live in a safe world. Those of us who won’t be killed by our governments, and if we are imprisoned by the state, who can count on the rule of law and a robust journalistic community to relay the information and initiate a public debate. I’m looking at those of us who enjoy a free press which can express our frustrations and ideas to the rest of society and go to schools and Universities that are strong-holds of freedom where we can say pretty much anything we want and assemble untroubled as we wish.
Because we live in this world, we can easily afford two things that our companions from Africa and South-East Asia have much more trouble securing: time and public organization.
These things make it a lot easier to follow the recipe for successful political activism. It goes like this: we need a problem, people willing to fight against it, and leadership to find solutions and defend them.

- Are you fired up? - Yeah! Oh wait, there’s a video of a funny-looking guy singing something about a rainbow

So let’s start with the first element: the problem. Not much needs to be said about this. Equality between men and women, or between colored and non-colored are a couple of century-long ones. As is the development of the welfare-state. Or the right to education and culture. And lucky us, we have a few problems which are unique to our epoch. Climate change, and the effects of globalization of course, are the most prominent. There is really no reason to remain on the side-lines. That rainbow ain’t going nowhere, but that drought might hit you next.
Then we need people to come together and do something about it.

The coming together part should be disturbingly easy. It takes five minutes to create a Facebook event, and two seconds to share it with our hundreds of friends. But of course, that is not enough. Just like The Who’s generation, we have to communicate with each other to organize a coherent movement. Incredibly large numbers are a good thing, but if nothing channels the potential of thousands of likes and shares into a political entity, then numbers become meaningless. My generation has no problem being lite up. But we have a serious problem remaining so for more than a few days. Unlike the virtual world, the physical one tends to resist change. It takes time to make it happen. Like a lot of time. But then again, that is the beauty of being young: we have more time on our hands than anyone else. If we began by using some of the 50 daily minutes each of us spends on Facebook alone to change the world around us, then maybe we would have enough time to indulge in socializing, which takes up only 38 minutes of our day, while walking to a meeting point to discuss a plan of action to secure Medicare (Stewart, 2016).

Vade retro leadership!

Now that we have a problem and people willing to fight it, we need a solution to it. That is a much more complicated issue, but one which has been shared by all youth across the world and the years. One particularity of my generation’s answer to this is our apparent disgust for organized action and constructed projects. We like it when things are instantaneous. We don’t want to think about the long-term. We are either too lazy or too stupid to realize that our actions are meaningless without proper organization. We hide behind ideals of freedom and equality of the movement to explain the lack of leadership, not to say the lack of ship altogether. But the truth is, people coming together for a ton of different reasons might look cool on an Instagram photo, but they don’t stand a chance against the real world. Even people who come together for a specific reason won’t last long if they cannot channel their individual presence into a united front.

Leadership is the best way to effectively promote a group’s interests. If a million students march down the streets demanding an increase of the education Department’s budget every week-end for a month, then maybe political parties will be more inclined to secure the vote of an active population and increase funding for schools, especially if they have a group of people to talk to. If fifty-million people share a video denouncing income inequality for a couple of days and then forget about it, I can guarantee you no politician will ever consider tax increases on the richest. If a news outlet invites the leaders of a youth movement to talk about their cause and no one is able to take on that role, the story will be about how dumb and insignificant we are. But if a movement’s leadership has the support of thousands of active members, then it will be more likely to enter 10 Downing Street or the Bundestag to lobby the government. Change is gonna come, but we only get it if we really want it.

Our place in the world order

My generation has the capability to mobilize like never before. Our heads are as filled with ideals as any young brain from any earlier times. We are asleep, that’s all. We live in a world were data and information are being thrown around left and right, minute after minute, day and night. It’s like being punched in the face over and over and over again. It wears you down. And so relativism and defeatism is our way of life.

How can we mobilize for gun control today when tomorrow we hear that 100 000 civilians are trapped in a city, bombed by their own government?

What is the point of coming together to tackle climate change when we are constantly told that our politicians are corrupt and our system is rigged?

How dare we demand equal pay for equal work when elsewhere, far away, some are being stoned to death for such a natural and noble thing as love?

I am part of that generation, and to my peers, I say this: I am no better than you. I spend my 50 minutes of daily Facebooking just like you do, scrolling over videos of face-plants next to outrageous images of kids burning in Syria. But I ask you: does it make you sleep better at night? You and I are going to live our whole lives in this world. We have a responsibility to ourselves and to the next generations to make our world a better place, one problem at a time. We are lucky enough to live in democracies, which means that we have the powerful weapon of voting at our disposal. We have to use that power to force our politicians to do what we want them to do.
“Yes we can” as a certain someone would say (Obama, 2017). We need to believe than we can, and then we need to do.

To the older ones, I say this: you were young once, and you know how we feel.
And just like you didn’t really want your parents to f-f-f-f-fade away, we don’t really want you to leave us alone. Help us out. Your responsibility towards your children and grand-children didn’t go anywhere. You have to teach us to want the impossible and you have to tell us to reach for the stars.

Bibliography

Carter, Clark and Randle (2006) People Power and Protest Since 1945: A Bibliography of Nonviolent Action (Housmans Bookshop)
Obama B. (2017) Farewell speech from time.com/4631007/president-obama-farewell-speech-transcript (Accessed January 2017)
Shmoop Editorial Team. (2008). My Generation Meaning. from www.shmoop.com/who-my-generation/meaning.html (Accessed January 2017)
Slackman M. (2011) Bullets Stall Youthful Push for Arab Spring from. www.nytimes.com/2011/03/18/world/middleeast/18youth.html (Accessed January 2017)
Stewart J.B. (2016) Facebook Has 50 Minutes of Your Time Each Day. It Wants More. from www.nytimes.com/2016/05/06/business/facebook-bends-the-rules-of-audience-engagement-to-its-advantage.html?_r=0 (Accessed January 2017)
Tsoi G. and Allen-Ebrahimian B. (2014)The People Behind Hong Kong’s Protests foreignpolicy.com/2014/09/30/the-people-behind-hong-kongs-protests/ (Accessed January 2017)
Wells T. The Anti-War Movement in the United States www.english.illinois.edu/maps/vietnam/antiwar.html (Accessed January 2017)