No matter where you go on the planet, young people will tell you that they feel like a major global or social shift is approaching; and if they don’t feel like it’s coming, then they’ll at least tell you that they want it to. Is everyone feeling a bit anxious and uneasy lately? I’m not talking about the "normal" anxiety regarding graduating college and trying to start a career. I’m talking about the I-can’t-put-my-finger-on-why-I’m-feeling-so-tense feeling. I’m talking about what keeps us up at night; about our collective future — as citizens, as a nation, as a global society and as a species.
I know it sounds cheesy — phony, even — to say that the youth of the world today are, for the most part, operating on the same wavelength. Haven’t the younger generations always felt a certain way about themselves? It’s certainly natural to, as a generation about to seize political power, become starry-eyed and arrogantly ambitious. Young people at any age have felt this way. Imagine being a college student amidst the fervor of the early 1940s, for example, or in the turbulent late 1960s — two eras of American history in which a surge of new ideas, violence and a proverbial shedding-of-the-skin could be felt, promising a brighter, more enlightened future.
But that future never arrived, and maybe that’s why we feel so queasy entering adulthood burdened with the pressure that, to any generational outsider, would appear to be exactly what they had endured years before. But this time, something’s different, isn’t it? And if it isn’t, it needs to be.
The global economic crisis is certainly picking up speed as it tumbles downhill. The dominoes appear to be falling in faster succession. First Greece, then Italy. About a month ago, anarchy struck the U.K., leaving London’s streets red, and a few weeks later, destructive and passionate riots set fire to Sweden, of all places, every night for an entire week. Most recently, Istanbul in Turkey has witnessed fierce commotion and protest, and of course, with Spain’s youth unemployment at just about 50 percent, agitated and bitter demonstrations by the Spanish youth activism group, Youth Without a Future, continues to plague major cities. In every case, tear gas and rubber bullets are fired into crowds of young people demanding change from their governments, and urban fires and looting are common.
It’s easy to ignore these international howls of the youth here in the U.S., with most of the upheaval occurring across the pond. But if you really think about it, things haven’t been much more peaceful here. Who could forget Occupy? Let alone the Aurora shooting, and I shouldn’t even have to mention Sandy Hook or the Boston Marathon.
Granted, these massacres weren’t the result of some youth protest movement, but the sudden frequency of this terror certainly indicates to the American people that something just isn’t right. We can feel it everywhere, from the unreliable bantering and distortion of facts from the right and left news media, to corporations like Monsanto, which is close to monopolizing America’s food supply, to the recent unrest over the passage of CISPA, an act which allows companies like Verizon and AT&T; to hand over our personal lives to the government without blinking an eye.
Things are changing here in America, quickly and quietly. We appear to be headed down the same road that has Europe in a clamor. How long will it be before our image of a pristine America becomes fully engulfed by the absurd corporate greed and government authoritarianism? Can you imagine an America where routine riots occur not just in major metropolitan areas, but in our suburbs? Imagine seeing firsthand the obscene police brutality that’s been seen in the countries of our allies in the recent weeks. Hundreds of years after America’s inception, are we ready for the second American Revolution?
All of these nations are facing similar socio-economic issues, but larger still are the problems we all face together as the human race. Global warming is officially here to obliterate life as we know it, as the carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere have surpassed 400 ppm for the first time in history. And don’t forget about overpopulation and the growing scarcity of natural resources, clean water and edible food.
It’s no wonder our generation feels so overwhelmed. We yearn for yesteryear, when becoming a homeowner for a reasonable price out of college wasn’t so outlandish. We’re not just worried about rent, we’re worried about misogyny, the drug war, another great depression, unemployment, impossible debts, World War III, and our planet becoming an inferno. To top it off, it’s 2013 and equal, unalienable rights still aren’t a reality for everyone in America. The problems have been here for generations, and yet nothing has really been rectified. Why? Money’s involvement with politics. Our generation is waking up to the fact that money must be extricated from government policies and social action.
The issues have simply grown too big for the institutionally wealthy to keep screwing around, hoarding capital and squelching cultural, social and global growth, and we know it. The tables need to be turned, something has to get done — and that is why young people today are feeling so anxious. We don’t need a national revolution. We need a generational revolution, and it’s up to us, the millennials of all nations, races, ethnicities and sexualities to make it happen.
Don’t panic just yet. Our generation is packing a secret weapon, one that no previous generation ever brought to the table. I’m talking, of course, about the Internet. The international protests being fired up around the world in the past few years have all started with a simple spark from places like Facebook or Twitter. Thanks to the Internet, our generation’s collective leaps in education, in addition to the inconceivable amount of free information and access to global communication provided by the World Wide Web have given people of all categories and identities a way to unite, organize, band together and learn from each other about the world.
The Internet arrived just in time to help us save ourselves from a life that’s really no life at all, but we have to utilize it, not just selfishly for ourselves, but for a way out of this ludicrous modern condition for future generations. Humankind is ready for our next leap, its ready to be reborn. If we can keep our heads on straight for just a little longer, we might be able to enact the change our parents and our parents’ parents have been looking for in the past century. All we have to do is turn on, because the revolution certainly won’t be televised — it will be tweeted.
Send Jake your thoughts on the next revolution at jwadler@asu.edu or follow him on Twitter @MrJakeWAdler
