The Millenial Perspective Young, Lazy and Entitled

Jan 07, 2019 News

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– do we have the staying power?

By Kemol King
I have longed to see a revolution of young, passionate individuals mobilising against injustice and for the promotion of our best interests. Every now and then, a few young activists or advocates start a group and say that they want to advance this cause. They get impassioned and they huddle up together to talk about how powerful we are; how great we can be. Then, they lose momentum. They go back to their lives, where they felt voiceless before, and it all just fades away.
We have a lot to blame for our failures, today. We can blame rapid technological advancement for making us anxious and lazy. We can blame our parents for raising us to think that we could become anything we want to be, then we can blame global capitalism for concentrating so much wealth into the hands of rich, old, white men that things pretty much became dim for the rest of us.
There’s a point at which you have to stop and tell yourself that, regardless of the limitations, you have to stand up and take what you want, yourself.
That’s not my way of saying that young, millenials aren’t doing that. There are many dynamic young people involving themselves in the systems that affect their lives, trying to make positive change. The problem isn’t that we’re not involved. The problem is that we expect much more from society than we’re willing to work for. We are lazy and entitled; a recipe for failure.
I knew that in this current political climate, young people don’t have much of a voice. What we have is positions in various ministries and departments of government, and political parties, where we are used as tokens to advance the political agendas of our seniors. Don’t crucify me; there are few exceptions.
I don’t think that youth are given a voice in Guyana’s political arena. We weren’t going anywhere when the PPP/C were in government, and it went even further downhill when the APNU/AFC coalition took over.
One of the first things the APNU+AFC government did when it took office was to minimise us by turning the Ministry of Culture, Youth and Sport into a mere department. Minister of Education, Nicolette Henry was responsible for the ministry, and she had come heavily under criticism for her handling of it. Then, in 2017, the President announced that the responsibility for the Department of Culture, Youth and Sport would shift from Henry to Minister of Social Cohesion, Dr. George Norton. I’m not even sure whether the Ministry of Social Cohesion is actually a ministry, or just a department, because it comes under the mantle of the Ministry of the Presidency.
This is something that I had not realised until a young man, Matthew Gaul, rose this contention at a youth forum I attended on Saturday last. Gaul said that he wants the department of Culture, Youth and Sport to be returned to its former status as a ministry, or rather, The Ministry of Youth.
To add to that, I had been ecstatic in 2016 when I found out that there’s a National Youth Policy, which was adopted in 2016. The Policy is quite progressive, in my opinion, and it stated that a National Youth Empowerment Action Plan would be formulated to guide the execution of the plan from 2016 to 2020. We’re in early 2019, and there is no such plan. The policy wasn’t even available online, until late November, 2018.
There’s a lot more that I could say that made me feel small in the eyes of this government, but I’ll stop there and talk about this new forum that I went to, which I’m hoping will be the youth forum that doesn’t lose momentum.
Dubbed “The Policy Desk”, the inaugural session was held at the Theatre Guild on Saturday last. For full disclosure, the coordinators are Vishal Joseph, Eden Corbin, and Dennis Glasgow, who is a close friend of mine.
The young activists said that the activity is meant to “foster a new era of civic and political engagement amongst Guyanese youth, many of whom are displeased, disappointed and uneasy about the current political climate.”
Building on disgruntlement with the current political climate, they galvanised a gathering of over 200 young people in a matter of days, and told them that their voices matter. Then, they handed the microphone over. The aim of this new movement is the involvement of youth across the different divisions of race and class, and have youth recognised as a powerful political force who could organise and make demands to leaders about our development. They intend to have regular sessions, countrywide, and then report those demands to all political parties.
What I heard was the same rhetoric I hear from young people every time they group up to talk about youth empowerment. There is a likelihood that this will diminish with time, but I’m hoping that they are as angry as I am with our leaders. And if they are, The Policy Desk could be an enduring, political force. While that builds, I will be on their backs, to make sure that they are as diverse, transparent, democratic and honourable as they need to be to make this country great.

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