Rethinking Youth
I had an incredible experience earlier this week.
For those of you who may not be aware, TAP currently has openings for new positions. We’re expanding our team as we move forward into future campaigns and endeavors. I’m looking to bring on new writers for TAP Weekly. I want this platform to have more perspectives, more people who have great ideas and might see certain things in ways different from myself.
I had a meeting with a prospective new writer this past Sunday. They crushed it. They were well prepared and very impressive, with a long list of accomplishments and successful past work to their name. I was floored, honestly. When I was their age, I was nowhere near as in tune with the world around me. I had nowhere near the amount of sociopolitical awareness, and I hadn’t done nearly as much work in changing the world around me in a positive manner.
Then, as soon as I had that thought, I had another one.
They shouldn’t have had to do all this.
They should not have the understanding they did of the caste system in America, of how systemic issues create a hierarchy that affects people’s day-to-day lives. They shouldn’t be so knowledgeable of atrocities committed against marginalized groups that still haven’t gotten recognition and haven’t seen the affected groups get retribution. I know adults who have lived decades beyond this person that have a fraction of their world understanding, and they’re in high school.
As soon as I had this second thought, I knew I was going to write this. It gave me the final piece I needed to address feelings brought up by another recent event: during a recent speech, former President Barack Obama said that the coming generation is the source of his hope when it comes to combatting climate change and reversing wrongs in the world.
Nothing in recent memory has made me angry with such speed.
Please. Stop. Putting. The. Fate. Of. The. World. On. The. Shoulders. Of. The. Youth.
In the 8 years of his presidency, Obama spent the first four with next to no climate action whatsoever, then the final four with a flurry of negotiations and deals on the issue. Those negotiations and deals were flimsy at best, however, considering how successful the Trump administration was at rolling back those measures. The Paris Agreement? We left that. Obama’s Clean Power Plan? Replaced by incredibly weak emissions regulations. By the time Trump left office, he had rolled back enough regulations without implementing any new ones to add nearly 2 billion tons of extra carbon dioxide to the atmosphere by 2035. These kinds of actions have real consequences- people who are currently under 40 can expect to face a life full of droughts, floods, and heat waves that the world has never seen before. The severity of these events will only rise if left unchecked, affecting everything from national power grids to global water supply.
Yet the person who had 8 years to create strong, lasting change that couldn’t be overturned in 4 years has placed their hope for the future in…me. A person who was in elementary school when he was elected, and who has also never been the President of the United States of America.
A group of people with catastrophic amounts of student loan debt, who are dealing with the aforementioned effects of climate change in real-time, and who may never own their own home are being tasked with saving the world as we know it and I need it to stop. We aren’t happy about it. We have more than enough going on as it is personally without having to bear the burden of other generations’ responsibilities that they didn’t handle. You can’t call us lazy and then place the future of the Earth as we know it in our hands. That’s not how this works.
I’m aware, as many younger people are, that we have no choice at this point. I realized it back in 2015. The moment that sealed the deal for me was when during a debate, when asked about the nuclear triad, Donald Trump did not know what it was. Not only did he not know, but that moment was breezed by like nothing happened. He then of course won the presidency, with older people voting in spades for the person who had no idea what our nuclear arsenal was. From that moment onward I made it my mission to know more about the world around me, to understand both politics and the global landscape we inhabit to the best of my ability. For the record, our nuclear arsenal is comprised of ICBMs (intercontinental ballistic missiles, SLBMs (submarine-launched ballistic missiles), and strategic bombers. We have weapons for land, sea, and sky. I learned this from a Google search 6 years ago. It’s not that hard.
What is hard is seeing people your age and younger organizing constantly and knowing you shouldn’t have any of the knowledge you do, and that you wouldn’t have to if other people had just done their jobs.
We’ll continue protesting and organizing. We’ll continue standing against racism, xenophobia, transphobia, homophobia, and the like. We will do our absolute best with what we have, staying involved and breaking down as many barriers as humanly possible.
Don’t romanticize what we’re doing, though. We didn’t ask for it and we shouldn’t have to do it.
There’s plenty more to talk about, plenty more dots to connect, plenty more context to give. We’ll continue doing so next week at 2 PM.
