June 14th, 2010
Featuring
Like other under-represented groups in the places of power, young people are marginalised. In the elections, we were restricted to “youth issues”. In the economy, we are treated as ideal bait for consumption.
In society we are asked to wait our turn, we are the “next generation”, but next never means now.
You can argue this has always been the case, but it’s only now that those in power don’t just ignore young people, they boldly pretend to speak on our behalf.
It’s partly why we are least likely to take part in the political structures defined by the generation that preceded them. This has created a gap which grows the conditions for more radical self-organising activism to thrive.
There’s this amazing tension between young people’s feeling of powerlessness towards a society we have had no say in shaping and our energy to want to take back society and reshape it into something far different.
With the crisis we face, people are crying out for a new way of doing politics. It’s not that young people aren’t interested in politics, it’s that we see no way of being able to make change happen
Our grandparents fought for the welfare state. Our parents fought for individual rights. What is our generation fighting for?
