The average age of a U.S. senator is roughly 63 years old. Whenever I read anything about the health care debate, I can’t help but return to that fact. Right now, there are 100 people molding a health care system they on average won’t live long enough to really use. It doesn’t matter if they dawdle on climate change — the coasts will still be above sea level when most senators die. There are consequences to a lack of representation, and students are paying the price.
While Congress and the president dither on jobs, young people face an increasingly insecure job market. Banks going into shock after overdosing on greed constitutes a national emergency, but a 18.7 percent youth unemployment rate is apparently something we can wait out. In September, the Department of Education released new statistics on student debt, and they don’t look pretty: Two-thirds of college students borrow money to get through college, and they have an average debt of more than $23,000 when they graduate.
Any positive work the government has done on student loan reform and college aid pales in comparison to the wave of budget cuts and tuition hikes that have hit universities nationwide. This goes way beyond personal responsibility — we are being badly represented by our elders.
Perhaps the more jaded among my readers think I’m about to call for young people to register to vote or lobby their representatives. I wish we got off so easily.
Young people showed up to elect President Barack Obama just like we were supposed to and this is where we are one year later: two disastrous and enduring wars, a collapsed economy, happy bankers and insurance salesmen and no progress on averting complete ecological catastrophe. Sorry if this is too real for the old folks out there who thought we spent all our time tweeting about Obama’s green policies, but you shouldn’t believe everything you read.
To quote The Coup’s Boots Riley — who was still scheduled to appear at a University of California-Berkeley student protest after police arrested 65 students at about 5 a.m. Friday — “Obviously what we’ve been doing so far ain’t working.” Around the world, I see hope where students are taking matters into their own hands. In Athens, Greece, on the one-year anniversary of the murder of teenager Alexandros Grigoropoulos at the hands of the police, middle schoolers took to the streets with barricades. In Tehran, students are risking death to fight against authoritarianism. I don’t believe in the power of prayer, but when I went to bed on the eve of Student Day in Iran (Dec. 6) knowing that protesters would be in jail or worse by the time I woke up, I wished I could.
In the United States, University of California students have not let police violence deter them from the fight for better schools. Instead, they have made the connection between the cost they pay and society’s ability to continue under the status quo. “Behind every fee increase, a line of riot police,” is one of the student occupation movement’s best slogans.
Iranian opposition leader Mir Hossein Mousavi may have put it best in his recent statements when he said, “Student movements are signs of realities greater than themselves.” Maybe electing a president was just a warm-up for our generation.
Malcolm Harris is a senior English and government and politics major. He can be reached at harris at umdbk dot com.