Talkin' to my Generation

Right now, I am wondering why Mr. Kanye West – why anyone, actually – has felt the need to go on record calling themselves “the voice of a generation.” Why does this generation need a voice to speak for us? We all have minds, hearts, and voices, do we not? Why, then, are we so silent? How is it that we have opinions on fashion, on pop culture, even on petty national politics at times, yet we remain oblivious to the world outside of our lifestyles? We should not be depending on Kanye West, Barack Obama, or Rush Limbaugh to voice opinions for us. We have minds. We have hearts, we have voices. Why are we allowing ourselves to be led by the nose, like so many idle sheep? Educate yourselves! Listen to your conscience and speak out! There is slavery in Africa, upheld by the mainstream chocolate industry. There is genocide in the Sudan, upheld by the Chinese government. Peaceful protesters are being brutally put down in Iran. Aung San Suu Kyi has spent the greater part of the last twenty years under house arrest in Burma for speaking out. Here in America, there are entire families homeless and without food or shelter. In countries all over the globe, there are young children working endless hours in deplorable conditions without even enough money to live on. What are we doing about it? We depend on politicians to get things done; we elect them for their elegant promises, and then consider our duties to the world done. I am not targeting any one politician; they have all betrayed us the same. We cannot simply cast a vote on election day, and then walk home to go back to our lives as though the world had been changed. We cannot ignore the condition of this world.

You have a mind. You have a voice. You have the right to be free, to live and breathe and eat and drink and laugh; do you not have the responsibility to fight, to give that freedom to every other living person on this planet? We are born into our circumstances; we do not inherently deserve what we are given at birth any more than any other human born to any other parents in any other place. There is no reason why being born in America should give you more of a right to be free, just as being born in a village in Darfur does not mean you deserve to be raped and killed. But we’ve inherited this world, our generation has. We’ve inherited this world full of smooth-tongued, power-hungry politicians, and we’ve inherited some kind of system that tells us that on one side there are good guys, and the other side is not to be trusted. I tell you now that this is a lie. There is good and bad on both sides; both sides are labels. Stop listening to the fanatics on both sides of the system! Read the facts, from as many trustworthy places as you can, and then follow your own conscience. Stop letting others speak for you! You have a mind! You have a voice! Your voice is important, what is behind it is important; your mind, your conscience, your freedom is your birthright, as it is with every other human on this planet. Do not let it be taken from you!

Please. We’ve lain silent long enough—too long. It’s time to stop letting people speak for us, decide for us; we’re adults, or we soon will be. It’s time to start thinking about the world we’ve been born into, it’s time to step up. We’ve been born to this Earth, for better or worse—how will we leave it?