ID :
164371
Sun, 02/27/2011 - 10:14
Auther :
Shortlink :
https://www.oananews.org//node/164371
The shortlink copeid
The awakening youth majority
TEHRAN, Feb.27(MNA) -- Let’s be realistic, let’s seek the impossible.
With 101 fewer characters than Twitter’s archetype, the May 1968 slogan blew up 43 years later in Liberation Square in Cairo. Mubarak had run away, cornered by young people who had been raised in silence, who had never known any other government. Always the same face in the official pulpit. The fire that consumed Mohamed Bouazizi near his vegetable stand and that unleashed the fury of the Tunisian youth is still burning. Ben Ali’s 23 years with vainglory for life have vanished with his ashes.
There will be no way back for the awakening of the rebels who have shaken off the drowsiness of the millennium and entered history through a window. They can feel, at their feet, the quivering restlessness of old Europe and the devaluated empire beyond the seas. The perfect excuse of stopping the advance of Islamic fundamentalism allowed the powerful to kick the doors of the Arab nations, murder with euphemisms, and support atrocious, corrupted dictators, gears of the status quo who are preferable to the specter of Islam.
The kids did not go out to the square with the Muslim Brotherhood… The structures have made them invisible and there is no other space left for them other than cyber-individuality and the Counter Strike the developed world plays with them on the Great Net. But the message has already ceased to be the means for the media to mutate into broadcasts of the third millennium revolution through the networks that connect the different individual frustrations and turn them into collective dreams.
Mubarak’s desperate swipe to block Facebook and Twitter in order to stop the wave that would eject him from a position of power that was expected to last forever was pathetically in vain. Communication no longer has limits, and frontiers are mere virtual lines, cartographic residue. What the cohort forgot to inform the rais is that ten years ago only 500 million people had a cell phone and that today there are 5 billion. There used to be 250 million people who had access to the Internet. Today there are 2 billion.
The world’s youth has awakened. They’re on their feet. Poor, dismantled, with a deactivated future. Minors, delegates of hunger and marginalization. Painfully standing, scattered in the most shaken corners of the planet. In the global homeland, more than 42 percent of its inhabitants have lived less than 25 years. They are three billion. Famished children in Ethiopia, suicidal school kids in Pakistan, militarized children in Chad, enraged students in France, erratic young people in Cairo, engineers who set themselves on fire because their vegetable stands in the streets of Tunisia have been taken away, Arabian bloggers who take off their veils and put on jeans in their Facebook profiles, or kids who wear a cap on the cliffs of the outskirts of Buenos Aires.
90 percent of them live in underdeveloped countries. In other words: six out of every ten inhabitants of the emerging countries are under the age of 25.
Ninety-seven out of every hundred babies are born there.
They are the majority who grows and grows and can be seen in the rice fields, the burning sands, the metro staircases, or the dirt roads of Rosario.
They were given the worst possible world: where economies grow only for a few, crises devastate those who are always left behind, xenophobia burns, riddles, and smothers them, hunger tears them, and hopelessness enrages them.
It was in nobody’s plan that they would wake up one day. That they would soak the feet of their rebellion in the Mediterranean and they would shake up flagellant and guilty Europe.
That they would make the Mayoress of Salt very nervous; she who looked in the mirror of the thousands of burnt cars in Paris in 2005. In January, kids between the ages of 9 and 14 burned containers in solidarity with another, destroyed when running away from the police. In the Parisian suburbs, five years ago, the poor and immigrant youths reacted when two teenagers were found electrocuted, hidden in a transformer in order to escape from the police. Last year thousands of French students stood against Sarkozy’s retirement pension reform.
In Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen, and Algeria there are almost no political parties, or participation, or hope for a change. Youths were brought up confined by the girdles of legendary authoritarianism, terror transmitted from the womb and caresses.
Being locked up in a virtual world, with the alienation and incomprehension of the older generations, pushed them to rip the strings of their dreams.
Whether or not they end up taking the world and bringing down the monuments erected for dictators, the true revolution took place in their minds. In the sudden awareness that they are not alone. That they are millions of distresses waiting to happen. In the conviction that now they have deep flight.
And they are alert, to come out, any given day, from the planet’s outskirts and make history.
(The Spanish language original version of this article can be viewed at the website www.pelotadetrapo.org.ar.)
With 101 fewer characters than Twitter’s archetype, the May 1968 slogan blew up 43 years later in Liberation Square in Cairo. Mubarak had run away, cornered by young people who had been raised in silence, who had never known any other government. Always the same face in the official pulpit. The fire that consumed Mohamed Bouazizi near his vegetable stand and that unleashed the fury of the Tunisian youth is still burning. Ben Ali’s 23 years with vainglory for life have vanished with his ashes.
There will be no way back for the awakening of the rebels who have shaken off the drowsiness of the millennium and entered history through a window. They can feel, at their feet, the quivering restlessness of old Europe and the devaluated empire beyond the seas. The perfect excuse of stopping the advance of Islamic fundamentalism allowed the powerful to kick the doors of the Arab nations, murder with euphemisms, and support atrocious, corrupted dictators, gears of the status quo who are preferable to the specter of Islam.
The kids did not go out to the square with the Muslim Brotherhood… The structures have made them invisible and there is no other space left for them other than cyber-individuality and the Counter Strike the developed world plays with them on the Great Net. But the message has already ceased to be the means for the media to mutate into broadcasts of the third millennium revolution through the networks that connect the different individual frustrations and turn them into collective dreams.
Mubarak’s desperate swipe to block Facebook and Twitter in order to stop the wave that would eject him from a position of power that was expected to last forever was pathetically in vain. Communication no longer has limits, and frontiers are mere virtual lines, cartographic residue. What the cohort forgot to inform the rais is that ten years ago only 500 million people had a cell phone and that today there are 5 billion. There used to be 250 million people who had access to the Internet. Today there are 2 billion.
The world’s youth has awakened. They’re on their feet. Poor, dismantled, with a deactivated future. Minors, delegates of hunger and marginalization. Painfully standing, scattered in the most shaken corners of the planet. In the global homeland, more than 42 percent of its inhabitants have lived less than 25 years. They are three billion. Famished children in Ethiopia, suicidal school kids in Pakistan, militarized children in Chad, enraged students in France, erratic young people in Cairo, engineers who set themselves on fire because their vegetable stands in the streets of Tunisia have been taken away, Arabian bloggers who take off their veils and put on jeans in their Facebook profiles, or kids who wear a cap on the cliffs of the outskirts of Buenos Aires.
90 percent of them live in underdeveloped countries. In other words: six out of every ten inhabitants of the emerging countries are under the age of 25.
Ninety-seven out of every hundred babies are born there.
They are the majority who grows and grows and can be seen in the rice fields, the burning sands, the metro staircases, or the dirt roads of Rosario.
They were given the worst possible world: where economies grow only for a few, crises devastate those who are always left behind, xenophobia burns, riddles, and smothers them, hunger tears them, and hopelessness enrages them.
It was in nobody’s plan that they would wake up one day. That they would soak the feet of their rebellion in the Mediterranean and they would shake up flagellant and guilty Europe.
That they would make the Mayoress of Salt very nervous; she who looked in the mirror of the thousands of burnt cars in Paris in 2005. In January, kids between the ages of 9 and 14 burned containers in solidarity with another, destroyed when running away from the police. In the Parisian suburbs, five years ago, the poor and immigrant youths reacted when two teenagers were found electrocuted, hidden in a transformer in order to escape from the police. Last year thousands of French students stood against Sarkozy’s retirement pension reform.
In Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen, and Algeria there are almost no political parties, or participation, or hope for a change. Youths were brought up confined by the girdles of legendary authoritarianism, terror transmitted from the womb and caresses.
Being locked up in a virtual world, with the alienation and incomprehension of the older generations, pushed them to rip the strings of their dreams.
Whether or not they end up taking the world and bringing down the monuments erected for dictators, the true revolution took place in their minds. In the sudden awareness that they are not alone. That they are millions of distresses waiting to happen. In the conviction that now they have deep flight.
And they are alert, to come out, any given day, from the planet’s outskirts and make history.
(The Spanish language original version of this article can be viewed at the website www.pelotadetrapo.org.ar.)
