A Pause for Youth Day
Honouring sacrifice while cultivating gratitude
On this day in 1976, schoolchildren were shot by police during a riot to end the Apartheid regime in South Africa. The image of a 12-year-old schoolboy limp in the arms of a devastated rioter is the legacy that turned today into an annual public holiday. The death of Hector Pieterson on Youth Day marked the start of the Soweto Uprising that represents an unforeseen escalation in the struggle for black rights. Many more people would lose their lives until democracy would finally prevail in 1994.
It’s easy to fantasise about being born in a different, easier time. Many Millennials like to imagine that life in the 70’s would have given us more job opportunities, higher incomes, and the slower, relaxed lifestyle of our parents and grandparents.
It’s easy to believe that being born in a different time would have been better.
But let’s say we could be born again into a time of our choice. Would we have the same background, race, sex, or location?
Days like Youth Day highlight the truth. The economic ‘booms’ following World War II were defined by luxurious lifestyles, affordable property, and easy living. Yet, these years coincided with violence and cruelty.
Now that colonial economies are ‘open to everyone’, not just a select few, our current ‘economic misfortune’ looks more like a transitionary period for the long-term betterment of society.
The floodgates have opened: previously oppressed people are participating in the Monopoly game designed and mastered by men. The transition was never going to be smooth. The older players have established themselves, while new players are starting from scratch, in a pool of limited shareable resources. This ‘scarcity’ of resources a wake-up call. Change happens over long periods of time, but the cost of living crisis is not a crisis at all. It’s a reckoning, and a call to arms. In the march toward true equality and inclusion, we have discovered what damage has been done.
After all, the wealth of the few was never meant to be shared, hence its grotesque hoards bulging from beneath the scales of age-old, elitist dragons who sleep on the bones of slaves, women, and conquest. Anyone outside of their club have been devoured, but make no mistake: they are alive and well.
Despite the relative challenges of today’s world, I am grateful to have been born when I was born. As a woman, I am no longer doomed to an early death from childbirth, nor a life never having learned to read or write, nor live in servitude to a husband I’d never met, having been married off in exchange for land or a few crops.
This world’s arena isn’t built for everyone, but that doesn’t mean giving up. What if, over time, we make a home from the ruins of battle? I don’t wish to be born in a different age. Rather, I wish for a future where children aren’t forced to choose their battles, but choose how to take root, and grow into something un-bloodied and beautiful.
Gratitude is a small step toward honouring the sacrifices made on this day, in 1976.
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