Underestimate the young at your peril
Youth is not wasted in adolescence — teenagers have the power to effect real change.
I’ve often heard it said that “youth is wasted on the young”. As I resignedly trudge further from my own youth and closer to my “youth-adjacent” phase, I’ve found I couldn’t disagree more.
Young people have an energy and perspective that we sometimes lose sight of as we grow older. Youth is a font of wisdom, a bridge to innate truths unsullied by the frustration and disappointment of age. If we listened to young people more, we probably wouldn’t be in half the messes we find ourselves in today.
Amid the inter-generational warfare, there is a special condescension reserved for teenagers. Teens are supposedly selfobsessed, shallow, nave, antisocial, ungrateful, moody, rude, lazy, and any number of other unpleasant things. “Kids these days” are often talked about in negative terms, accompanied by rolled eyes and thrown up hands. Usually by those who have the least contact with young people.
So let me be a rude young upstart and unapologetically speak out of turn: anyone who underestimates young people is an idiot.
This week, American teenagers have dominated global headlines. Some stories have told of unimaginable tragedy — kids shot and killed in a place of learning — while others have highlighted inspirational young people who have refused to follow the same old tired script. A brave group of students from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, survivors of one of the worst school massacres in recent history, rebuked the usual, futile “thoughts and prayers” of their leaders, and demanded action. Never again, they said.
They have organised a national student walkout, slated for March 24, and dubbed the “March For Our Lives”. In the space of days, during which time many of the students have attended funeral after funeral, farewelling friends who should’ve lived for decades longer, a bunch of kids have managed to take a conversation that has been stuck in a vortex for years and turn it into a moment of reckoning. They have taken on a fight that should never have fallen to them and forced people much older — and supposedly “wiser” — to listen.
Whether they’ll be successful or not in their crusade for stricter background checks on those trying to buy firearms remains to be seen, but it feels as if something has begun to shift. When teenagers make direct appeals to the public, begging leaders to value their lives as much as they value the blood-spattered cash the NRA gives them to fund their campaigns, the horror of the issue begins to drown out the rhetoric. Even if “guns don’t kill people”, people kill children and guns enable them to do it.
The teens involved in the March For Our Lives have been accused of being pawns of the Democratic Party, a sentiment that reveals just how utterly repulsive the American political landscape has become. Through the smearing by the Conservative media, however, they have stood tall, channelling their grief into fighting for solutions that will hopefully save many of their fellow classmates around the US.
Teens like the students of Marjory Stonewall Douglas High School give me real hope for the future.
We have plenty of similarly inspiring rangatahi here in New Zealand. Take, for example, the Otorohanga College students who petitioned the Government for a day of remembrance for the New Zealand Wars. That day is now marked yearly on October 28.
Or the Wellington high school students who organised a protest against rape culture that brought hundreds of people to Parliament.
Or the founders of the Student Volunteer Army, who pulled together thousands of university students to assist with the clean-up after the Christchurch earthquakes.
I had the pleasure this week of taking part in a hui for rangatahi, focusing on the future of the arts.
As I sat around a table laden with scribbled sheets of paper, I was amazed by the ideas that my fellow participants shared with the group. I walked out the door wishing that the changemakers I’d spent the afternoon with were the ones making decisions. Then I remembered what one of them had said earlier — we don’t need to adhere to the same old structures any more, we’ll just go around them.
When you’re used to thinking about issues in a certain way, it can be difficult to break out of a mindset that has been cemented over decades. Youth offer an opportunity for society to “hack” conventions, processes and norms. They see the world around them from a different vantage point and are well placed to deliver uncomfortable truths.
They should be encouraged to speak up at every opportunity, as this world is as much theirs as it is anyone else’s, and it would be a better place if their wisdom were added to the conversation more frequently.
As David Bowie put it, “And these children that youspiton/Astheytry to change their worlds /
Are immune to your consultations. /
They’re quite aware of what they’re going through.”