the folly of youth
George Bernard Shaw said that youth was wasted on the young. All that energy, all that passion, all those dreams; they hold the future in their hands.
With its ageing populations, capitalist countries thrive on mythologising youth and have created markets for those who want to be 'forever young' as well as the young people themselves.
Youth is an ideal, and ideals can be far removed from reality. So is 'youth' more than the condition of being young? Is 'youth' a pejorative term? I only ever hear it or see it written in the media in relation to criminal or ant-social behaviour, or in the provision of social services for young people. It does not seem to be a term adopted by young people themselves to describe their identity.
Gender? Are youths young men or does the term comprise young men and young women? Is there a particular age that denotes 'youth?'
What is the reality for youth today? Without examining race, class, gender, cultural identity and ability to name some of the components that impact on the lives of young people, it is impossible to make generalisations about their experiences. What we do know is that when they act together they can be a powerful force for social change.
Witness the recent overthrowing of dictatorships in North Africa and the Middle East. Young people were at the forefront of the revolutions. Organised, effective and courageous young people who laid down their lives for freedom. The actions of these young people were heroic.
On the other hand, the actions of rioters in the United Kingdom have been reviled, and have given the Conservative Government a 'valid' reason for increased State oppression. The Government has determined the cause of the riots as opportunistic, criminal behaviour of the rioters themselves, and are shouldering no responsibility for the circumstances that led to them.
In a country where there is institutionalised racism and a class system embedded in the society there will be unrest. People that are marginalised and oppressed will demonstrate their anger and frustration, and it won't be in one of the 'nice' ways, like writing letters to the editor and lobbying their parliamentary representative. These are options for the educated and middle class.
However, many of the rioters were acting without compassion and the traditional notions of solidarity with each other, or a political understanding of the ability of an oppressed group of people to effect socio-political change through civil disobedience or public demonstration. There was no understanding that the Pakistani shopkeeper whose shop was destroyed was also a brother in the struggle for justice, or that the African mother whose car was torched was a sister in the fight against racism. The attitudes expressed by some looters were that that they were just taking what they could never have, or what they thought they deserved. The right to possess a flat screen TV. Was that what the riots were about?
Of course not. We know that a person's worth is not determined by age or gender or money or status or skin colour; aren't we all human beings? The ideals of equality and justice are something that we believe in, even strive for, but only the naive believe in their existence throughout every facet of society. Young people know that a person's value is measured by what they earn, what they own and what they buy. Rich people are more important than poor people because they have more power.
How do angry young people express their anger and frustration at being powerless? In the same way that a powerless young person may do so within their family; destruction of property, including their own, self harming, and in some instances violence against others. The results of their actions are often similar; punishment and rejection. For a short time they may have drawn attention to their cause, because they engendered fear in those around them. However that soon turns into loathing; angry people are hard to love or forgive.
I recently watched August Baol, the founder of Theatre of the Oppressed, in an interview about his life. He recounted the story of a play he performed, at a time when the land owners were stealing and occupying peasant lands. The play ended with the protagonists declaring 'we have to spill our blood to save our land.' A peasant watching the play came to the theatre troupe and said that they had spoken the words of the peasants and asked them to bring their guns and join them in the fight to reclaim their lands. To which they replied that the guns were not real, only theatre props. The peasant said that they had enough guns to share with them, and the actors were forced to admit that they were only dressed as peasants. They were artists, not fighters. To which the peasant said that they were talking about peasants blood not artists. At this point Baol realised that they were unable to speak for an oppressed people. However, as actors they could help them to find their own ways of fighting.
I cannot speak for young people, but I can assist them to find their own voices and the means of expressing them. I can also challenge the dominant voices assaulting the ears of young people; not their loud music but mass media in its relentless projection of consumerism, the greed ideology. I can show compassion towards them in the hope that they too will be compassionate. I can listen to them.
There is nothing more dangerous than to build a society, with a large segment of people in that society, who feel that they have no stake in it; who feel that they have nothing to lose. People who have a stake in their society, protect that society, but when they don't have it, they unconsciously want to destroy it. Martin Luther King Jr.
Photo by Roman W. Schatz
