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Dear Youth Get Off Your Butts!
o be perfectly honest, it’s not that hard to make yourself heard when you want to be. With all the amazing array of gadgets and assets these days, well, with the click of a ‘publish’ button, you can start a [insert something dangerous here]. (Heck, you can even do that by creating a song about a certain president’s banana, but that is besides the point.) It helps that this is the youth’s generation, and it would be pretty hard teaching a person so used to snail mail how to make an iPad work. We, however, were practically born in it.
And yet many of us still find an excuse to lie around our houses with all these perfectly good weapons, and complain about stuff and how nobody listens to us. Well. It’s so…passive. We want things to change but for some strange reason, they aren’t. There’s a simple solution…
Activism.
Act…ivism.
Active…ism
Act, and be active. Yep, that’s right. The only way to get things to change is to act towards it. And you can’t ever be too young to be an activist.
Let’s get one thing straight: activism violence of any kind. Being an activist doesn’t mean creating awareness by shooting people. It just means making an effort to achieve positive change.
Think about it this way: if people never know there’s a problem, they will never realize that it needs to be solved. And if people know there’s a problem, but it’s irrelevant, it will be ignored. If people are aware there’s a leaky faucet but have no knowledge that it can probably cause their whole house to get flooded eventually…they’re definitely going to take action. (Unless they’re clinically insane, that is. There are always those kind of people.)
When you think about it, it’s actually insane, how many problems could have been solved if people just got off their butts and acted towards achieving something. And who better to inspire change…who more passionate, than the youth?
Adults are getting, well, old, and eventually this generation is going to have to take over the world. That won’t be a very nice task if the world is already half in ruins by the time we get there.
There’s another, bigger problem though…a lot of the youth has somehow been deluded into thinking that their thoughts don’t matter. This, my friends, is a complete lie. What makes one person’s thoughts more relevant than another’s? Wealth? Age? Fame? How about none of the above?
Dear youth, it’s time to get away from that favorite spot in front of the TV or computer screen and be ACTIVE. If we want change, we have to be the ones to inspire it. And your contribution, no matter how small, if you keep at it, will eventually grow, and it will matter.
“Little drops of water make a mighty ocean.”
IVANA OFORI
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Ivana is an avid writer, blogger and great artist.