This is the last issue of The Varsity for this academic year, and it’s customary in this final editorial to look back reflect on it all. This editorial, however, is concerned with the future.
We live in a society that constantly craves youth: from botox to beer to Becel margerine (“Young at heart!”), being or acting young is a cultural obsession. Supermodels are over the hill at 30; advertisers salivate over the 18-34 demographic; store shelves are stuffed with products that promise to erase wrinkles, fat, and gray hairs. You’d think being under 25 was the best thing since indoor plumbing, and yet for all its preoccupation with youthfulness, this is a culture that is systematically eating its young.
We see it here in Ontario, where rising tuition and anemic government funding are weakening colleges and universities and driving thousands of students into unsustainable debt; we can see it in France, where riots are breaking out over the French government’s decision to strip young people of equal job security that every other employee expects and receives; we can see it in Iraq and Afghanistan, where young people from the U.S. and Canada are dying in aimless combat, killed by even younger men who pledge their lives to a grisly present rather than an uncertain future; we see it in Uganda and the Ivory Coast, where child soldiers as young as ten are drafted to kill each other on behalf of tinpot dictators and dime-store warlords.
And most distressingly, we see it worldwide in the cavalier attitudes so many governments, businesses, and individuals take toward the cascade of ecological catastrophe playing out around us today, this very minute: mass extinction, climate change, deforestation, desertification, pollution, drought, the growth of slums, and outbreaks of infectious disease, the consequences of which will be visited on generations yet to come.
The future of our planet and our civilization is being mortgaged for the sake of today’s tidal wave of cheap cars, fast food, and disposable trinkets, and the eventual cost is looking further and further beyond our means to pay.
This is not the behaviour of a world that, in the immortal words of Miss Whitney Houston, “believes that children are our future.”
Our generation is the most affluent, most privileged, most egalitarian, most successful generation in human history (at least, those of us in the developed world). Canada especially has enjoyed a period of remarkable economic growth, political stability, and multicultural harmony, and for this we are rightly thankful. But it’s time to acknowledge the dark horizon we are rapidly approaching.
This sounds pretty pessimistic, and it should, because there are few grounds for optimism at the moment. But there is one thing we have on our side, and that is our youth.
U of T attracts and trains some of the world’s great minds (hence the slogan), some of whom will be graduating in a few short weeks; others still have a few years to go. It’s time to put some of that greatness to work to correct the errors of our elders, errors they didn’t even know they were making.
Every generation has collective feelings of grandeur, that it is bound for glory or doom unknown to any before it; and sure, there’s a certain arrogance in believing that we’re going to be the one chosen generation that’s going to witness The End Of The World As We Know It. But arrogance is one of the great things about being young. And if we don’t believe these things, if we don’t get mad that our kids could conceivably live in a world without tigers or ice caps or pension plans, then we fall victim to the complacency that has brought us to the brink we currently teeter on, believing century after century that someone else’s grandchildren will clean up the mess.
So that’s the message of hope here, meagre though it is: our great minds can do great things, and perhaps we can choose not to live as eternal teenagers, but grow up and take responsibility, show the leadership and the resolve that are so badly needed, and choose a future worthy of the generations that will follow us. To paraphrase Ms. Houston, we’ve been taught well, so it’s time to lead the way.
