It’s the same battle as old as time. The old versus the youth. Having to share a world which confuses and hurts them both. Some journeys are at their nearest end and it hasn’t gotten any better, leaving the walker tired and sour, while some haven’t even started their walk, but they see that the road ahead is corrupted and rigged—completely against those who dare to step out.
It’s an old battle. It’s always the old complaining about the times, and saying that the youth these days are ill-mannered and don’t respect their elders. But it’s the youth that understands these times, as it was the times of their childhood that they lived through.
We’ve only ever really known this world. We still have our eyesight, looking around, unsure for our futures, unsure if we get to be able to live to see them. (Global warming, for one reason, which literally endangers us by the melting of the ice caps.)
But the world is constantly changing, and some aren’t able to change along with it. The majority of the navigating it is left to the youth, despite not having the blueprint of this world built by the old. The world we live in is molded by the people who came before us—people who are considered old. The same people sitting in parliament, those governing the world they built but can’t understand. The wars they started, the insecurities they created, the change they can’t accept.
And the ones that grew up in this world, the youth, are the ones mapping out each corner, having to take blind leaps of faith. We don’t know where we’re going. But we put one foot in front of the other, making decisions we couldn’t care less about. We’re picking up pieces left by the old who said they’d ‘fix it in the future’—and since we’re the future, apparently, that leaves their job to us. Let’s take a look at global warming again. All these factories are run and put up by adults, with the most famous climate change activist being in the spotlight since she was twelve years old.
It’s the articles posted on Facebook, as they spew words that paint over the youth like we’re just little kids that need to be scolded—for our attention spans, lack of manners, our speaking up. It won’t be over any time soon. They want us to grow up and get used to things, to not be so sensitive. They want us to give up our passions to sit behind a desk at a job that we hate. They see the graffiti along the wall and paint over it with a boring grey—the same colour as those suits they wear when they look down at us for our bright colours and ‘edgy’ clothes.
They treat us as kids, and expect us to act like adults. The youth are always tired of this system, always fighting, and have spent decades dedicated to this battle. But the battle never comes to an end. The youth ages into the old. The kid always becomes the adult, and that memory of those bright clothes and innocent smiles soon fade into that boring grey. All these adults—journeys almost over, still sour, still yell at the kids who skateboard past in the side walks. It’s always a battle. A battle as old as time.
Cossar Salesa-Lee – Year 11
