The Modern Myth of Youth

by André Dao

This piece was originally published in Voiceworks No. 75. It was the winner of the Write Across Victoria Short Story Competition.

It wasn’t too long ago that the prophets of globalisation were predicting that unshackled economics and vast advances in technology would help eradicate poverty and political instability in the world. The conundrum they now face is that while we have the resources to make global solutions physically and logistically possible, racial and political violence is just as, if not more, endemic than ever. The gap between the rich and the poor continues to widen. One of the most common refrains being heard from the media is that apathy lies behind our inability to convert the promise of the worldwide human rights movement into tangible reality – and when it comes to pointing the finger, blame is laid most often and most loudly at the feet of “the youth of today”.

Disengaged and self-centred, we’re supposed to be more interested in self-gratification and cheap thrills than in the lives of people beyond our immediate social circles and the rose-tinted screens of commercial television and Hollywood. But delving beyond sensationalist stories about knife-wielding, brain-dead teens constantly plugged into i-Pods, camera phones and laptops, it becomes clear that young people are not only engaged with human rights but are often the driving forces behind it.

The real problem is not that young people are apathetic. Rather, it is that there is a dearth of forums dealing with the important issues of human rights within which young people are welcome. While the representation of young people in the mainstream media is widespread, young voices are seldom heard amongst the cacophony of tutting elder voices. The top down approach epitomised by the Northern Territory Intervention inevitably marginalises the weaker and oppressed groups. What amounted to military occupation of remote Indigenous communities was always done in the name of the Indigenous inhabitants, yet there was a total lack of consultation before the police and the doctors descended. The repeated cry, ‘what about the children’, while ostensibly a noble one also served to paint those Indigenous communities as unable or unwilling to care for their own – with the result that their voices could justifiably be ignored as the authorities swooped to ‘save the children’.

In the same way, almost all the programs dealing with the rights of young people are initiated by the elder, and without input from the young people themselves. Education and juvenile detention are just subjects whose immense impact on young lives and well-being is contradicted by the lack of discourse between the younger and older generations. Again, the overall picture painted is that we are unable, and unwilling, to know what’s best for ourselves. Despite the enormous enthusiasm and energy behind student and youth driven organisations, they are too often locked out of national conversations as soon as they’re given the politically fatal labels of ‘youth magazines’ or ‘student groups’. The wane in student politics is not necessarily the result of apathy, but rather disillusionment. We still care, but as our voices are increasingly consigned to the periphery, we can’t help but begin to think of our own opinions as marginal and unimportant.

The claim that young people are disengaged is therefore a self-fulfilling prophecy. As with Indigenous people, the homeless and asylum seekers, by not valuing our engagement, wider society makes us irrefutably disengaged. What makes matters worse is that this effective silencing leads inevitably to homogenisation – and if human rights seeks to protect and celebrate human diversity than there can be no greater threat to it than the ever more popular brush of sameness with which our feathers are tarred.

The intervention was an unapologetically one-size fits all solution to the problems confronting many Indigenous communities. This was not only one of the major criticisms of the intervention but of the whole history of European attitudes towards the inhabitants of this so-called terra nullius. By ignoring the fact of Aboriginal diversity, we go against the very spirit of the human rights movement – to treat every human being as an end in themself, and never as a means to an end. A vital part of this is to allow each person to speak up and to speak out, not merely as a statistic but as an individual. This is the only way to combat real and perceived apathy.

For young people, this is both an opportunity and a pitfall. As the media lumps us into broad generalisations, where the flaws of some are taken to be indicative of the whole, our natural inclination is to assert our individuality. However, all too often we fall into the trap of expressing ourselves in a borrowed language of irony and satire that served another generation well in battling the ‘squares’ of the establishment – but which now only serves to further mire us in the semantic bog from which our voices are too easily ignored.

The art, writing and actions of young people today testifies to the fact that us youth are not disengaged or disinterested – quite the opposite – but instead we’re disillusioned (and justifiably so). Anger can, and should come easily in a world of undisguised double standards, as human rights are too often pandered to political interests – Mugabe, Burma and Sudan stand out in recent memory. However, the language of disillusionment, which is the language of rebellion and confrontation is too easily pushed aside and categorised by the older generation as the easy passion of youth. Since the student activism of the sixties young people have been exceedingly good at creating underground spaces within which their creativity, intelligence and opinions can be shared and developed – but now we have been consigned exclusively to those forums, which are simultaneously discounted as immature and frivolous. The challenge now is to emerge into the light and show the grey-haired doubters that we can convert our disillusionment into a new language of engagement they can’t so easily discredit.