Dear Young People-Bad Guys and Hope

I want to start this off by saying that I’m not talking about my own political views in this post. Nor is this going to be an attack on the older generation, even though it may seem like it. Whatever you chose to vote in the EU Referendum is your choice, and I hope you are happy with your decision. Instead, I want to talk about what a lot of people my age seem to be saying about us leaving the EU, the people fronting that campaign, and the general lack of hope I seem to be seeing not only from people my age, but of all ages in the Remain camp.

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Dear Young People,

I think this is the first time in our generation that the bad guys have won.

At least, who we perceive to be the bad guys. I’d argue that amongst most teenagers, Nigel Farage, Boris Johnson and Michael Gove are the trio of people we despise the most. I will not go into why this is, because that’s not the point. But I see a lot of hatred directed towards these three people in particular.

We’ve been very fortunate in the sense that we’ve not really been old enough to be fully aware of anything truly terrible going on. At least, not on our own doorstep. For people around twenty, all the major events that we might have witnessed in our own country we either: don’t remember, or weren’t old enough to fully grasp what was going on.

With the rise of social media, we are capable of learning about a variety of different experiences and horrors people are facing all over the world. At some, we mourn. At others, we make light of (Donald Trump, I’m looking at you). And yet our generation, in the United Kingdom anyway, have yet to face anything overwhelmingly negative.

But, finally, that occurred. The bad guys, our current main antagonists, people we have sneered at and loathed and despised, have won this battle. They came out on that morning with their smug grins and their victory parties and they gloated. They had won, and for the people in the Remain camp, they had lost.

So, for the first time, we are faced with the idea in real life that sometimes, the good guys don’t win. We’re used to that in novels on occasion, but real life? That’s a bit different. And it’s funny that, isn’t it? How people always say, “stories are just stories, life is much more realistic!”. And yet, for a lot of teenagers, we’ve never had to experience something where we look on, slack-jawed, as something that could be horrendously damaging happened to our future.

And so I see a lot of people, some I’m close with, some I’m not, despairing. And in their opinion they have reason to, and I will not dispute that.

I have, however, seen some rather alarming posts from people my age that I care about, that state that they’re ‘losing hope’.

See, leaving the EU doesn’t scare me. Staying in the EU doesn’t scare me. ‘The Bad Guys’ winning doesn’t scare me. But people losing hope? Yeah, that does a bit.

But I don’t think we should lose hope. Why? I can think of a few reasons.

If you want to look at things like a story, how do they usually go? The bad guys, at the start, win a battle. They get a big victory of some kind, in order to drum up tension and intrigue. It’s to get a little voice in the back of your mind thinking, ‘these characters might fail, they might not be able to come back from this’.

But what happens? In the end, although it might end up bittersweet, the good guys conquer the evil-doers and all is well.

This isn’t a story, though. This is real life. And real life is far different from a story, it doesn’t follow a specific pattern or rhythm.

You’re right. But the fact of the matter is that 73% of people our age voted to Remain.

73%.

And that was just people between the ages of eighteen and twenty-four. Can you imagine how many would’ve voted if the age limit had been lowered to, say, sixteen?

It’s the most united we’ve ever been on anything. I have never seen such a large amount of unity from people my own age. Of course there are people my age who wanted to Leave, and that’s fine, and I respect that. And there are also a lot of people my age who didn’t vote, which is genuinely a shame, but I digress.

But a vast majority of people between sixteen to twenty-four that I’ve come into contact with, whether via the medium of the internet or in my day to day life, have wanted to stay.

But Remain lost. But why does that mean the unity has to go? We lost a battle, yeah. But the war’s not over.

We were united. We stood together, shoulder to shoulder and tried to voice change. This time it didn’t work out. But we discussed it. We talked about it. We debated and sometimes we yelled and got passionate and maybe even slung insults at each other, but my God we cared.

And what did we care about? Our future. A future that is still ours.

Every generation has faced hardships. Some stronger than others, but it is a reoccurring trait between us and every generation that has come before. They struggle and scratch and claw their way through their lives to a better future, sometimes even having to rebuild in the rubble created by the previous generation.

I’m not here advocating for Remain, nor am I advocating for Exit. Nor am I saying that the people who voted Exit did it for the reasons I listed below, nor do I just believe it is the older generation doing this. But I’ve also seen evidence, truly despicable evidence at that, of people using this Referendum as a means to be racist.

But I have to say, on a personal level, I don’t get angry when an older person spews racist rhetoric. I don’t get upset when someone tells someone of a different ethnicity to ‘go back to the EU’. I don’t get heated when someone’s main reason for leaving the EU is to do with ‘immigrants coming in and stealing all our jobs’.

Instead, I just feel sad.

Because I don’t think a lot of them are that cruel.

But I think they’re very, very afraid. They’re scared of a world that’s constantly changing around them, of a world that’s evolving before their very eyes. A world where their outreach and opinions are becoming less impactful, and a world that isn’t what they’re used to. A world where their future is now their present, and one day their present will become our past.

Fear is a powerful motivator, with the ability to cause good people to say and do horrible things.

Fear twists a world-view into something monstrous. Where they see an ‘immigrant’, I might see a person. Where they see a ‘group of migrants’, I might see a family. Where they see ‘people trying to steal our jobs’ I might see people trying to make a living.

The older generation has grown complacent. They’re refusing to let the world change without them, refusing to let us go into the future. Whether you like it or not, this seems to be a fact.

I have no issue with leaving the EU. I have no issue staying in the EU. What I have an issue with is that decision being made by people who won’t be relevant when the ripples of what should’ve been our decision finally come into effect.

We as young people talk about how shit things are a lot. We complain and we whine, and a lot of it is justified. But we’re also the most privileged generation ever, especially in this country.

Because we live in a country where there are so many different cultures and people to see and learn about before our very eyes. We live in a country where we are given the opportunity at higher education in order to be the best we can be. We live in a country where, while homophobia and racism are still obviously high, people who love each other can walk down the street hand in hand, and can get married, and can raise families. We live in a country where we have access to the ever-growing and expanding technological world, with advances in medical sciences, engineering and everything in between are happening daily.

We live in an amazing country and an amazing world. A world that is ours for the taking.

We are going into a future where we will have access to information and technologies that the previous generations could only dream of. We’re heading into a place where we could cement ourselves as the greatest generation in human history.

If there’s one thing our generation should never, ever become, it’s complacent. Whether we like it or not, the current generation, the ones who are making our decisions for us, will be remembered as those that fell to fear and fell to complacency.

So let us become the generation that overcame fear, and never grew content. Let’s be the generation that continued to push the boundaries of tolerance, the generation that advanced further technologically than any that has ever come before it, and let’s be the generation that learns from the previous’ past mistakes and forges a future brighter than any they can foresee.

I won’t speak for any of you, but I know for a fact that I’m going forward and taking my future. Whether I walk there at a leisurely pace, or scratch and claw my way through the rubble of those selfish enough to only think of their present, I will take what is mine. You can take what is yours. We can take what belongs to us.

This is our future.

And with a little bit of hope, unity and determination, we can make sure that that we never have to face another set of Bad Guys again.