Angry Young People - Educating to Inspire Action

We are angry young people. We are maddened, saddened, disillusioned, disunited, desperate. We look, hear, feel across spaces and places, across the "developed" and "developing" divide, the blatant and extensive abuses of power by those in power, and we learn how our legal and political systems keep it this way. In the US, Australia, and other "free" countries there is a tightening of legal and political constraints on voices, on previously enshrined and hard-won liberties, on identities, and on physical bodies. Elsewhere in the world, where there is chronic poverty, disease, corruption, and violence, to these places our governments send our troops, our liberal economic policies, our "national-interest." We take no steps forward and are powerless to stop the retreat into more and more maldistibution of wealth, funding, resources, services, information, privilege, and power. Education has not only lost value, it devalues people while truth, in the age of information, is harder than ever to find. Anti-racism, along with "social justice," has become a throw-away, cliche label of a lost cause and divisions, divides, tensions and misunderstandings grow and expand and push and worsen old and new conflicts. A focus on healing is sacrificed for a focus on forgetting; learning to empathise and to understand sacrificed for being taught to fear and to blame.

We are angry young people. We want to voice our anger and we want to act. We want to learn from each other, and from YOU, whoever you are, and we want to teach one another. This is only a beginning.