I have got myself into a tangle with this blog, because of making it about various subjects instead of just one: when I talk about writing, I lose followers on the political bench; when I go on about my poilitical beliefs, the writers press the snooze button; when I talk about feminism, it's the male majority clicking "Unfollow." Consequently, my "Followers" have been hovering around the same number for years. If you want numbers, you just have to step into one bubble or other and not try to dance between them. But, anyway, I'll keep doing just that, because lots of things interest me, and I have to talk across the spectrum, otherwise I am liable to drop off to sleep myself.
Yesterday, the youth of America, to the tune of 185,000, left their desks in high schools all over the country and protested against the National Rifle Association's control of American politics. "The right for us to have lives," they said, "tops the right of lunatics to carry guns." In response, the trully evil NRA tweeted a picture of the exact kind of automatic weapon that killed seventeen high schoolers in Parkland, Florida, just a month ago. So, it gets you in the heart, this upswell of hope that voices can make a difference, especially the unbroken voices of twelve-year-olds and children who are yet to grow into full stature.
On the same day, some organisation positioned 7,000 pairs of shoes on the lawn of the Capitol in representation of the kids that have been killed by guns since the unspeakable tragedy of Sandyhook elementray school where twenty six and seven-year-olds were massacred.
It ought to shame us all into deep deep levels of conscience that this is what the adults in the room have pushed our kids into taking up arms against.
And yet it brings hope, doesn't it? Young people are always under fire for having their noses in their phones, and yet here they are, the only voice of sanity anywhere to be heard.
Yesterday, too, a graphic appeared on my Twitter feed that shows a similar upswell of youth in my home country of Scotland.
The young people of Scotland are clearly for a country that governs itself and is not in servile gratitude to a master government that even as we speak is trying to reduce the power of its parliament. It's only a mater of time until the unfettered conscience of the young bubbles to the surface. It voiced its outcry in the Civil Rights Movement, in South Africa against apartheid, in the USA against Vietnam and now about the dark hole in which politics has come to reside.
In other cultures, we would be taking in the wisdom of the ancients, but the old ones in this culture have little of that. The old ones have given in to conditioning and the directive that they have nothing to contribute. At best they are apathetic, at worst sychophantic enablers.
So, it's to the young ones that we must turn our ears. Hopefully, time will let them tell. Tick tock. Tick tock.
No comments:
Post a Comment