The First Flash

"Any man who is under 30, and is not a liberal, has no heart; and any man who is over 30, and is not a conservative, has no brains."

The first flash of faith, they say, is always the strongest. And the same could be said about the first flash of social awareness. At the first instance when a young mind is coming to know the injustice in the world, when their reception of it is all consuming and most passionate, it is stifled. No, the world is no simple place, and young passion alone doesn't rectify injustice, but neither does the experienced complacency that condemns it on those grounds. Young passion is stigmatized, it is marginalized, because it is inexperienced. The powers that be like to view it as misguided and naive, the result of a sheltered individual just coming to terms with the world around them, feeling one way or the other about the injustice out there, and having no idea how the world actually works or the possible ramifications should their ambitions be realized. It is for this reason that youth passion is shot down.

The powers lay the claim that youth passion is naive, that its solutions to social injustice are uninformed and too simple. As often as this is the case though, youth passion does not have a monopoly on presupposing uninformed simplicity onto a complicated world. Simplicity is in saying things are too complicated to work toward a solution in, simplicity is in ignoring the plight of those obviously wronged by systematic injustice to save face before one's own, simplicity is in "bending the rules" to fit personal interests when one is tasked with serving the will of the people--these are all things "experienced" complacency (apathy) apologists cling to while condemning so-called "youth passion" as simple-minded. They know how the world works, alright, they are experienced in it--it just so happens that in their years of experience, they've learned how to make the system work for themselves, and are unwilling to give it up. That's what's really going on.

Show me a youth who has chosen to exercise his or her passion against such a system in anti-social or naive ways (terrorism, vandalism, violent protest, dramatics...etc.), and I will show you a case of an aged and crooked judge, a dirty cop, a corrupt politician--people who have chosen to exercise their "expertise" with the system in selfish and destructive ways. Who shall we trust more, then? The liberal with no brain or the conservative with no heart?

At least when the passionate youth speaks, they speak from the heart, they speak with passion in their convictions, no matter how naive they may sound, they are speaking what they perceive to be the truth. If they say that love conquers all, it is because they believe it. If they say universal platitudes, "peace must come," it is because they mean it. They say what they mean and mean what they say. The experienced mind has lost its passion because it is necessarily bogged down in the reality of life. This is not a bad thing, it is just the way things work. It does not say what it means or mean what it says because it knows what it is saying is probably untrue.

Why then should we trust it?