Brian Dominick
Naive
as I was in the mid-1990s, for a spell I actually thought there was a good
chance that, by the turn of the century, the terms "ageism" and
"youth liberation" would be ubiquitous in the Left’s vocabulary.
Toward that goal, I spent most of the decade writing and speaking on youth
oppression and liberation. And while I think my own and countless others’
attempts to increase awareness of this cause have had some significance, it has
mostly been among progressive young people whose collective consciousness has
raised somewhat substantially — not on the adult Left.
It
is a success, no doubt, that where youth groups a decade ago were almost
exclusively focused on organizing young people around causes not necessarily of
specific relevance to kids themselves (such as environmentalism, animal rights,
prison abolition, antiwar efforts, and so forth), today there are a number of
youth organizations which focus at least somewhat on the causes such as
education, child abuse, age prohibition laws like curfews, and so forth.
That
is, over the past several years, more and more young people have been taking up
their own liberation cause — not just as young people of color, or young women,
working class kids, and so on, but as young people per se. And though I’ve
worked with a wide variety of "kinds" of people focused on huge array
of causes, no group has been more inspiring to me than youth liberation
activists.
As
I get older, I continue to look to self-consciously radical youth for the
motivation I need to trudge on as an activist, organizer and commentator. And no
matter what I try, or how far from adolescence I get, I am thankfully unable to
turn away from the movement which first taught me what principle and revolution
are all about. What is inspiring is the very fact that, despite monumental
barriers, a youth liberation movement exists at all — let alone one that
flourishes.
This
inspiration is remarkable not least because the cause of youth liberation is
neither explicitly supported, nor really even recognized, by the broad Left of
which most kid lib activists consider themselves a part. Indeed, to an
astonishing extent, the existence of ageism — the oppression of young people
based on the factor of age — is not even considered legitimate enough to go on
some of the most exhaustive "laundry lists" of oppressions touted by
the Left.
Youth
liberation activists are additionally inspiring because the movement itself
experiences a rather unique kind of attrition: youth activists, and young people
generally, tend to "age out" of being oppressed for their age and
enter the oppressing class. At a certain point, we’re supposed to look back at
all the concerns and all the terrible experiences we had when we were young —
bad experiences we had because we were kids — and deem them all petty. All of
the indoctrination, all of the invalidation, all of the abuse, all of the
deprivation, all of the coercion — it’s supposed to vanish. But does it?
As
we pass through our twenties we start to forget certain things. If you are poor
now and you were poor then, you don’t forget the poverty. If you are a female
now and you were female then, you don’t forget the sexism. But since you’re
older now, but you were young then, the ageism fades away.
We
forget being "tracked" and force-fed lies in school. We forget being
denied pursuit of our own interests, or even the prerogative to maintain a shred
of dignity in the face of adult authority (and oppressive fellow children). We
lose track of what it was like to be told to shut up, to sit still, to mind our
own business, to not have an opinion, to do and say and eat what we’re told. We
slowly fail to recall the way adults spoke to us, or for some even the beatings
or the molestations. We forget the daily humiliations, the advertisements which
told us to fear (and how to combat) acne, how to "clean" our
"dirty" bodies when they bleed. We block out what it was like to be
afraid to touch ourselves.
But
what did it all do to us? Did we really recover? Worse still, what will not
having undergone a thorough process of liberation — and continuing to resist
the impositions of adulthood and its particular expectations — do to who we are
now?
Somehow
we begin to convince ourselves that all of the above things — the
characterizations and manifestations of ageism — are not as relevant to
progressive causes, to social change, as are those of racism, sexism, classism,
and so on. But why not?
Without
for a moment intending to diminish the vitality of being aware of such even
extreme acts like racially- or sexually- motivated violence, the actual numbers
of these types of crimes are dwarfed on the same scale as those attributable to
ageism. Consider just a few facts about the oppression of young people:
+
5.5 children are murdered by their parents each day.
+
Kids who are sexually violated regularly undergo the experience with startling
repetition, not as somewhat isolated incidents (even more often than adult
victims of such crimes).
+
In most places, it is legal to hit children, and even to sever certain of their
body parts.
+
Not only are children the only classification of humans against whom
discrimination is not only legal, but such discrimination is actually encouraged
and carried out by laws themselves, approached in severity only by laws
regarding disabled people and "illegal" immigrants (two more groups
the Left’s record of ignoring is shameful).
+
Almost nowhere — at home, school, or in civil society — is there even the
illusion that children are allowed to make significant decisions for themselves
(you won’t even find lip-service toward that end).
+
In the US, laws regarding children as property often use precisely the same
language as those referring to slaves and wives used to, and all are effectively
the same — the difference being that child property laws are still on the
books, virtually unchallenged.
This
kind of severity is consistently denied, or at least ignored, by the same Left
which champions countless other worthy causes. Yet all of us — those who define
the "Left agenda," to the extent there is one, were at least at one
time kids ourselves.
So
how long will it take for the age-class consciousness of a generation of young
people to be raised? When the barrier is a guaranteed opportunity to convert
from oppressor to oppressed (guaranteed to those who survive adolescence),
there’s no telling what specifically will need to happen before the idea of
youth liberation is passed down through generations in place of all the
repressive and oppressive shit kids currently inherit.
It’s
not very comfortable to find oneself among the oppressors. Of course, being
among the oppressors is not the same as being one. However, being among them and
not self-consciously resisting the role implies our complicity and guarantees
our eventual participation. This is so for white people, for men, for straight
people, for the economically privileged and the abled, and for all who can
benefit from systemic oppressions simply by not being one of those directly
oppressed.
Unfortunately,
if previous experience with adult denial of ageism and the need for youth
liberation (a need which we never outgrow) is an indicator, I know that since
you’ve read this far, it’s unlikely you’re an adult. However, if you are,
perhaps you won’t be for long.
Young
people are "ageing out" of the youth liberation movement at a slowly
but steadily decreasing rate, or so it seems. Still, unless it becomes absolute
across a generation, that decreased rate of attrition needs to be complemented
by resistance among adults — not only to their own ageism and that of their
"age-class-mates," but to the ageism which has stripped them of all
that was once youthful about themselves. Unless becoming an oppressor is somehow
biologically ingrained in our beings, it is a social phenomena which we can
abolish.
If
you’re still a kid, I have one piece of advice which I offer at risk of coming
off as patronizing: Maintaining your youth is not as easy as literally tattooing
your politics on your skin, as I have learned. Anger toward and resistance to
adult society aint necessarily as permanent as ink or scars.