CHILDREN OF THE REVOLUTION
Young people are too busy whingeing into their smashed avo to take an interest in the world around them. Right? Katherine Smyrk explores how a group of angry teenagers proved everyone wrong.
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N FEBRUARY THIS YEAR, 17 people were killed in a shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. We know how this plays out. The script is well worn. The collective heart breaks for the lives lost, too young. Politicians send their thoughts and prayers. Hot takes about Australia’s superior gun laws litter the internet. Celebrities post about their sadness, disbelief, vowing that it will never happen again. The NRA talks about the second amendment. And then the world moves on. But then a young woman with a shaved head appears. This high school student is grieving – yes. That we understand. But most of all, most surprisingly, she is angry. Doesn’t she know the script? “We call BS!” Emma González shouts into our TVs, our mobile phone screens, our internet browsers. “They say…that us kids don’t know what we’re talking about, that we’re too young to understand how the government works. We call BS!” Her speeches are shared with righteous and emphatic clicks across the internet, and we find ourselves in new territory. Instead of this event becoming another entry in the sad annals of mass shootings, it takes on a new life. González and her baby-faced compatriots stand defiant on the cover of Time magazine. They channel their fury onto social media with a power that sends ripples worldwide. They organise the March for Our Lives, which
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draws an estimated 800,000 people to the streets of Washington DC – the biggest rally in the country for 40 years. They send confrontational tweets to their president, saying: “Don’t you dare say that it is our fault, unless you were there, unless you tried your best you have no right to tell anyone what to believe.” When right-wing commentator Laura Ingraham belittled Parkland teenager David Hogg on social media, he called on advertisers to boycott the program with cool aplomb – her show lost more than half its ad time the next week. A video of González shaving her head with the caption “When you got work to do but your hair’s gettin too long #BaldiesGetTheJobDone” was retweeted almost four thousand times. The 18-yearold now has 1.58 million followers on Twitter; far more than the NRA. They hurl the script out the window and people around the world can’t get enough of it. There’s a special buzz that comes from knowing that you’re watching history unfold. You watch speeches from González, interviews with Hogg, read articles by survivors – not because gun reform directly impacts you, but because you know something special is happening. After donating US$500,000 to the March for Our Lives, Oprah Winfrey tweeted: “These inspiring young people remind me of the Freedom Riders of the 60s, who also said we’ve had ENOUGH and our voices will be heard.”
Barack Obama echoed the sentiment in an article he wrote for Time: “They have the power so often inherent in youth: to see the world anew; to reject the old constraints, outdated conventions and cowardice too often dressed up as wisdom… If they make their elders uncomfortable, that’s how it should be.” But it can be easy to dismiss young people. And since time immemorial, that’s what has been done. Aristotle once said: “[Young People] have exalted notions, because they have not been humbled by life or learned its necessary limitations… They would always rather do noble deeds than useful ones… They overdo everything – they love too much, hate too much, and the same with everything else.” In a 1966 campaign speech, Ronald Reagan labelled young anti-war campaigners as “beatniks, radicals, and filthy speech advocates” and the University of Berkeley as “a haven for communist sympathisers, protesters, and sexual deviants”. In 1976 American author Tom Wolfe wrote an essay about young people for New York Magazine that coined the term “The Me Generation” – which was seized upon by social critics as the perfect term to describe the “narcissistic” young people who were obsessed with “self-fulfilment”. These days tabloids twist themselves into paroxysms of outrage over reports of “trigger warnings” and “safe spaces” in schools and universities, trumpeting