by Allison Lee
It doesn’t matter if you receive your daily dose of news through the physical newspaper, salon gossip, or the six-inch screen we call ‘phone’. It doesn’t matter whether you’re awake, sleeping, or traversing in limbo; the world continues to spin, and the news continues to churn. It doesn’t matter how the information is presented to you, be it texts, photos, or videos; no source will ever be 100% truthful – this much we know.
The bitter pill to swallow here is that the media only reports what benefits them. If you need an example to believe me, look at the Black Lives Matter movement in the United States. In the first week of protests, every news outlet flooded to the scene in hopes of earning a worthy scoop. Come the second week of protests, videos and photos started presenting the police as sympathetic to the movement – taking knees and hugging the black community; however, the cameras were cut right before the police stopped kneeling and started tear-gassing protestors. By the third week of protests, the news reel had all but capped the content and put on a façade that ‘the protests are over’.
There have been instances where ex-journalists confess that they were told to produce a minimum of five articles per day even if it means that they have to rip it off another news publication. It’s upsetting to know that professionals who are paid to deliver truths to everyday people are doing considerably worse than a squad of teenagers who have a functioning camera-phone and a Twitter account. No, wait. It’s embarrassing.
I recall how distraught I was whenever I’d unlock my phone to never-ending tweets encompassing videos of the police harassing peaceful protestors, photos of discriminatory actions against the LGBTQ community, text chains about how to help Yemen, ignorant words from authorities, and the most depressing of them all, another hashtag immortalising the name of yet another life lost. And the source of all this information? Young people.
Lately, it seems like the influx of discouraging news is triumphing over that of positive ones. We expect the authorities and our leaders to instate policies and draft laws to uphold equality and justice. They are the ones with power, yet they are doing anything but exercising the power we have given them to solve problems. We as a global community have not been moving forward for a long time. We are not even staying stagnant; we are moving backwards.
Frankly, the older generation who are now in power don’t care about our future. At least, they’re not caring enough. For lack of better words, a good proportion of them aren’t going to live past the next twenty years. They are basking in the glory of their inventions from back in the day, the creations that have brought us the technology and convenience we own today. They are indulging in a nice afternoon tea with the economy, trying to sweet-talk it and pamper it up. They think they’ve done enough.
With all due respect, my elders, if we all die in the next twenty years, I don’t see how the economy is going to matter. The problem is that even with the older generation feeling as though they’re chapter is closed, they are reluctant to elect a new generation of leaders into parliaments and congresses due to low voter turnout and voter suppression.
The long-standing mindset that our elders have more experience than the youths and hence have a better blueprint laid out for the country discourages young people from voting during elections, be it senate or president. When the young stand up to fight and are mercilessly shot down by the elder generations, they lose hope and start thinking “Well, none of these candidates truly represent the values I stand for, so why should I vote? My one vote wouldn’t change anything anyway.” The problem is that every young person thinks this way, which accumulates to millions of eligible voters staying home during election days. In the end, it is the generation we refer to as ‘boomers’ who are lining up outside polls, eager to cast their votes for aging politicians who are focusing on the wrong issues.
Furthermore, the foundation of voting in many countries is shaky. Repressive voter ID laws, racial gerrymandering, and voter roll purges are just a few of the many cracks evident in the voting system. It is especially difficult for minorities to cast their ballots, and even when they do, government workers will come up with a whole menu of excuses to write their votes off as invalid. Believe it or not, the number of prisoners a county incarcerates also influences elections, but that’s a discussion for another day.
And so, with world-wide leadership failing to act quickly and diligently and at the same time hesitant to pass the torch, the burden of sustaining a livable tomorrow falls on the shoulders of the everyday young, and thank God for the young.
Today, we see youths creating charities and funds to save the oceans and marine lives, we see them skipping school to bring attention to climate change, we see kids out on the streets with cardboards in their hands protesting, we see them make art and music about it. We see them.
This is the inspiration behind starting Getting It Strait – to empower the voices of our youth who are so commonly dubbed ‘the leaders of tomorrow’. We can no longer deny the injustice and inequality that has been woven into our lives and the system that repeatedly fails to support these lives. There is a general consensus that steps have to be taken to alleviate the disastrous reality that we live in: racism, gender inequality, pay gaps, income disparity, education disproportion, famine, poverty, homelessness… just to name a few. We have placed our faith in world leaders for centuries now, yet something as imminent and frighteningly real as climate change (which has been forewarned around 30 years ago), is still not on the path to being ameliorated.
Before real action can be executed, there is a need for all of us to first raise awareness about everything that is happening without the slightest ounce of bias or fabrication. What is going on in every nook and cranny of the world has to be reported as it is, and what it is is the consequence of our cumulative actions as mankind.