I sometimes think about what I’d be like if I were a kid now instead of decades ago.
I’ve been trying to get people in power to listen since I was 7 years old. My first, most instinctive medium was sobbing, upon seeing a commercial for Foster Parents Plan, at the injustice of kids in Africa starving and covered in flies while we sat comfortably bingeing on chips and pop culture.
Subsequent media included writing and directing a school play, short-form radio commentary, much writing in newspapers, and eventually research for Parliamentarians, on many of the same themes and topics as now but less dystopian then.
If I were a kid now, staring down this future while adults expected me to smile for an unlivable wage while waiting to see whether climate or societal collapse comes first? I would be unmanageable with rage. I don’t envy parents right now, but that rage is legitimate.
We’re taught that with a good education we can change the world. We’re taught we have freedom of expression, and that university campuses are the institutional vanguard of human truth. But when kids so much as politely sit together to raise the alarm about an actual genocide we can all literally see is happening and ask the people in power to at least just stop funding it, universities sic phalanxes of riot police on them. Kids see that adults’ rhetoric doesn’t match the practice, and they see little benefit to continuing to pretend when the status quo future is so bleak.
I am in awe of this student’s bravery, clarity, and grasp of the facts. When are we going to stop taking orders that cause harm?
Kids these days
I sometimes think about what I’d be like if I were a kid now instead of decades ago.
I’ve been trying to get people in power to listen since I was 7 years old. My first, most instinctive medium was sobbing, upon seeing a commercial for Foster Parents Plan, at the injustice of kids in Africa starving and covered in flies while we sat comfortably bingeing on chips and pop culture.
Subsequent media included writing and directing a school play, short-form radio commentary, much writing in newspapers, and eventually research for Parliamentarians, on many of the same themes and topics as now but less dystopian then.
If I were a kid now, staring down this future while adults expected me to smile for an unlivable wage while waiting to see whether climate or societal collapse comes first? I would be unmanageable with rage. I don’t envy parents right now, but that rage is legitimate.
We’re taught that with a good education we can change the world. We’re taught we have freedom of expression, and that university campuses are the institutional vanguard of human truth. But when kids so much as politely sit together to raise the alarm about an actual genocide we can all literally see is happening and ask the people in power to at least just stop funding it, universities sic phalanxes of riot police on them. Kids see that adults’ rhetoric doesn’t match the practice, and they see little benefit to continuing to pretend when the status quo future is so bleak.
I am in awe of this student’s bravery, clarity, and grasp of the facts. When are we going to stop taking orders that cause harm?