Generation Precarious

I saw the best minds of my gen­er­a­tion” being dog-walk­ers or ask­ing ’Would you like fries with that?’”

This may well be the sen­ti­ment of plenty of young peo­ple under the age of 30 across the de­vel­oped world. Cer­tainly, I in­clude Cat­alo­nia, and es­pe­cially those who camped across Barcelona’s main street of Gran Via and into the pub­lic square in front of the Uni­ver­sity of Barcelona.

Yes, they had other is­sues too that are im­por­tant to them: the jail­ing of in­de­pen­dence move­ment lead­ers, po­lice bru­tal­ity against pro­test­ers, in­creas­ing legal re­stric­tions on free ex­pres­sion, but one of their other three stated aims was “a dig­ni­fied fu­ture.”

It’s worth con­sid­er­ing what this means. I see no rea­son why we should sim­ply ig­nore the dif­fer­ent groups who made up the “en­camp­ment”. When I vis­ited the area in early No­vem­ber I saw groups of sur­pris­ingly youth­ful-look­ing kids being po­lit­i­cally ac­tive. Some were in their mid-teens but were con­fi­dent and ob­vi­ously happy to be there. One young woman I spoke to had a makeshift stall that was all about a red plas­tic rub­bish bin and her own writ­ing I read was a vague and con­fus­ing at­tempt at satire. An­other group were en­cour­ag­ing tweets as a method of ex­pres­sion where you could win a prize.

It’s dif­fi­cult to argue though, with much of what the main sec­tion of the Gran Via campers have said. Call­ing them­selves the ‘Oc­to­ber 14 Gen­er­a­tion’, their man­i­festo states, “We are a gen­er­a­tion with­out a fu­ture. The gen­er­a­tion of pre­car­i­ous­ness. The one that does not have ac­cess to hous­ing, the one that is the vic­tim of a sys­tem that threat­ens the very ex­is­tence of our planet. We are a gen­er­a­tion that has been robbed of the most basic so­cial and labour rights.”

To me, that is all clear and true. Only some­one liv­ing with their eyes closed could dis­pute it and in fact the far right con­tinue to dis­hon­estly and se­lec­tively use these young peo­ple’s sense of frus­tra­tion and alien­ation for their own po­lit­i­cal ben­e­fit all across Eu­rope.

Of course, it’s easy to write off the street-campers as just some uni­ver­sity stu­dent van­dals and fire-starters who are abus­ing the priv­i­leges that they’ve been given. Sadly, even a great writer and thinker such as An­to­nio Muñoz Molina (con­sid­ered to be pro­gres­sive) did this in a re­cent ar­ti­cle for El Pais news­pa­per. His com­ments seem to have at least partly come from jeal­ousy when com­par­ing his own strict up­bring­ing com­pared to “the aca­d­e­mic au­thor­i­ties’ pa­ter­nal and ma­ter­nal in­dul­gence” over these stu­dents’ post­poned exams.

To make a com­par­i­son, I orig­i­nally come from a part of the planet (Aus­tralia) where the level of po­lit­i­cal in­ter­est in most of the pop­u­la­tion, but es­pe­cially the young, could best be de­scribed as min­i­mal. In fact, ap­a­thy rules. I’m filled with op­ti­mism (rare for me) when I see young peo­ple tak­ing a strong in­ter­est in any­thing out­side their own nar­row lives, even if I don’t hap­pen to agree in all cases with every­thing they are on about. If any pro­tester any­where uses vi­o­lence against peo­ple or pri­vate prop­erty then I nat­u­rally con­demn it.

His­tory has taught us that for protest to gain enough pop­u­lar sup­port to cause mean­ing­ful, long-term, last­ing change it has to be non-vi­o­lent. If that means camp­ing out in a pub­lic square and main street, then that is a far more hu­man­i­tar­ian op­tion than us at­tack­ing each other with sticks. It might even help to fos­ter a fu­ture that is less un­sta­ble.