Too many times I’ve heard an adult say to me, “your generation is too sensitive!” “Kids these days need to toughen up! In my day we weren’t wimps!”. They seem to forget that their parents were saying the same things to them. People see age as a level of how wise you are, but that’s been proven to be false by people like our current president, Donald Trump. While it’s true some adults are smarter and more worldly than some adolescents, that isn’t the case most of the time on social injustices. But adults have the tendency to see themselves as superior and seal the youths mouths shut so we’re forced to just observe. We have to watch as they continue to leave our world in ruins. We watch as they fight in wars, and kill each other, and I fear they are teaching us to one day be the same, as their parents taught them, it’s a vicious cycle.
Every time I talk about problems we are facing today like racism, sexism, or just violence around the world someone always rolls their eyes and just replies with, “that’s just how the world is, there’s no changing that.” But it’s always an adult who responds like that. Young people are usually much more open to the idea of changing the world to be better, more hopeful. It’s still our time, the power will be handed to us next and it’s up to us to decide what to do with that. The current adults have failed in creating peace, and now they think there’s no changing it at all. The violence and destruction of the earth they’ve been watching their whole lives has corrupted them, but our brains are still fresh and those handcuffs of hopelessness haven’t been completely tightened on our wrists yet, there’s still time.
I’m not saying it’s going to happen over night- that one day we’ll wake up and everyone in the world will be smiling, but we can be the first step to that world. Even if we never reach that, we’ll be closer than we are now if we try. I refuse to surrender the mentality that there’s no changing the cruelty we see in the world today. No one is born a bad person, it’s a taught behavior, it’s time to stop that by spreading love.
Spreading love doesn’t have to be a huge act that makes it on the news, some of the most impactful things in someone’s life is the small things. You can push us towards a more positive environment by sitting with someone who’s alone at lunch, or simply smiling at someone you pass on the streets. Being kind doesn’t cost a dime.
I don’t want to take the cowards way out and hide from the problems going on around me, I want to face it and take it down head on. I will not put my hands up in surrender to the cruelty going around in my life. My generation sees the suffering in the world, and we don’t hide our eyes, we are trying to do things to change it. I’m proud to be apart of a generation many people see as wimpy or pathetic because I know it’s only because we aren’t hiding away from the problems in the earth. We know right from wrong and we are willing to fight until we reach justice.
I hope that one day when we are our grandparents age that we made the world a better place when the power was in our hands.
