I disagree that Millenials were never able to gain traction in any movement. Occupy was a huge movement, marches drew thousands of people, there were camps in every major city in the US for months and some in smaller towns also.
The problem wasn’t traction, the problem was that we weren’t able to control the narrative because it was an issue that was easily dismissed by people who didn’t live in our world. It was easy for people to paint us as entitled whiners who wanted everything handed to us because they’ve never personally experienced having a job that doesn’t pay for a degree, and having a degree but not being able to get any job related to it and having to take five part-time minimum wage jobs just to barely get by. And those people who have struggled with money and being able to get a job just think, “Well I did what I had to to get by, why can’t you?”
The difference between this and something like Occupy is that this is something people can’t ignore as a matter of life and death. There’s no painting this as children whining about not being handed free money and high-ranking management jobs with no work. There’s no claiming “Well I got shot at in school and I was fine” because they fucking weren’t.
Also, just talking directly about Occupy, because that’s the one I know the most about since I got super personally invested in that one:
Just because the camps emptied and people aren’t carrying around “We are The 99%” signs as much any more doesn’t mean that the Occupy movement died, it just evolved, and it did actually make some really important strides and continues to have influence today.
Occupy brought police violence back into the mainstream conversation. Everyone remembers Pepper Spray Cop, right? Those students were Occupiers and that guy became the poster child for unnecessary force against the movement. Lots of Occupiers went on to throw their full-hearted support behind the Black Lives Matter movement partially because of the police violence they witnessed through Occupy, because it opened their eyes to just how disgusting the police force in this country truly is. (To be clear I’m talking about us white Occupiers specifically, who, had we not been following those multiple Twitter live-feeds of police raids and seeing all of the pictures coming out of things like Pepper Spray Cop, lets be honest, would have probably been on the same “Well [victim] must have done SOMETHING to deserve it #notallcops” side our brethren have been.)
Occupy started the conversation about raising the minimum wage. Part of the dialogue from the beginning was pointing out to critics that inflation and tuition increases are a thing and that a minimum wage job in the ‘70s could cover more tuition than a minimum wage job now can. People started actually looking at the numbers and seeing this huge discrepency and realizing that there aren’t just college students taking these jobs trying to pay for school, it’s adults just trying to live their lives and provide for their families.
Occupy also started the conversation about free secondary education, since it started in NYC and one of the college’s in the city had famously been free up until very recent to the start of Occupy. They not only started that argument, they were able to convince several schools to set up free tuition policies.
Basically everything you know about economic inequality in the US, the unfairness of college tuition and loans and minimum wage and unpaid internships is thanks to Occupy. The minimum wage getting raised and colleges starting to be held accountable for excessive tuition is thanks to Occupy.
Hell, Occupy basically write the rules of successful protesting in the 21st century. I haven’t been to a protest or demonstration since that hasn’t utilized techniques that Occupy solidified. Which isn’t to say that Occupy didn’t take techniques from the movements that came before it, but that’s the whole point. These movements don’t end they just evolve.
I just hate to see those people who essentially made themselves homeless to bring attention to the severe social inequality and the profound impact that it’s had on Millenials and younger generations be written off as a movement that “didn’t get any traction.”
And that’s to say nothing of the Black Lives Matter movement, which has ALSO been largely Millennials, and I genuinely welcome people more involved with it than I am to talk in-depth about how it’s brought police violence into painfully sharp focus in the mainstream, how the violence has been inordinately weighted against black people, and how the mainstream coverage of it tends to ignore black women and particularly trans women.
Like, how can people genuinely say that Millenial protest movements haven’t gained traction when the most high-profile movement in the past five years has been Black Lives Matter?
I don’t understand.
Don’t let the mainstream media color your image of what Millenials have been fighting for and how successful they’ve been. For the sake of everything we are fighting for, for the sake of the younger generations after us and after Generation Z, for the sake of their movements and their protests, for the sake of not fostering a culture of Millenials vs Generation Z.
Tag: important as fuck
Heartbreaking scene from the film
Schindler’s List (1993)
OK LEMME TELL YOU STRAIGHT UP ABOUT OSKAR SCHINDLER.
Everyone knows the story, right? His protected workers? How none of his ammo worked? The full story is a lot more complex and a hell of a lot more breathtaking.
He wasn’t a saint. in fact, he was a bit of a douche, all things considered. Whored around on his wife, worked for the Abwehr, he was a member of the nazi party – not a particularly devout follower, but because he was a big fat remora fish who realised this particular shark could give him business opportunities, and if he wined and dined the upper crust that scored him even better ones. He realised very quickly he could make an absolute killing on the black market and dove in headfirst with the profiteering. Hell, he initially hired Jews in his factory because nazi strictures made them much much cheaper labour than hiring normal Polish labourers.
But the thing is, once you start surrounding yourself with a particular, persecuted demographic, you begin to notice things. You hear things, things you aren’t insulated from. You begin to realise something.
And Oskar Schindler began to dimly grasp what was happening and he realised that it was not something he could countenance. And his whole gameplay changed.
He no longer wined and dined for business opportunities, but to protect his workers. He went flat out fucking balls to the wall to rescue a group of his workers from the jaws of Auschwitz, and built them a “camp” that offered at least the barest of human comforts, right under SS supervision. He moved his entire fucking factory to save his workers, he realised an SS-provided list of names was left with blank spaces and just started filling in more. He blew everything he had made profiteering and scheming to protect 1200 people because he found that there was a fucking line and it had to be drawn. He arranged for three thousand Jewish women to be moved to textile factories in the Sudetenland to give them a chance of surviving the war. He blew all his money, resources and time on feeding, caring for and trying to protect as many Jews as he could.
After the war he failed every business venture he tried. He became a raging alcoholic, surviving on donations sent by Schindlerjuden. According to some, he traded the ring gifted to him by his workers for Schnapps. He died in relative obscurity, almost penniless.
He wasn’t a great man, or a saint. He was an average schmuck, and spent most of his time fucking around until he abruptly found himself in a situation where he couldn’t. He almost stumbled into his decency. But once he had, he absolutely took hold of it, and directly because of him 8,500 people are alive today.
Never, ever doubt the ability of a single human to RISE.
“We are all possible victims, possible perpetrators, possible bystanders.” – Yehuda Bauer
All of us.
Must reblog.
When I was nine, possibly ten, an author came to our school to talk about writing. His name was Hugh Scott, and I doubt he’s known outside of Scotland. And even then I haven’t seen him on many shelves in recent years in Scotland either. But he wrote wonderfully creepy children’s stories, where the supernatural was scary, but it was the mundane that was truly terrifying. At least to little ten year old me. It was Scooby Doo meets Paranormal Activity with a bonny braw Scottish-ness to it that I’d never experienced before.
I remember him as a gangling man with a wiry beard that made him look older than he probably was, and he carried a leather bag filled with paper. He had a pen too that was shaped like a carrot, and he used it to scribble down notes between answering our (frankly disinterested) questions. We had no idea who he was you see, no one had made an effort to introduce us to his books. We were simply told one morning, ‘class 1b, there is an author here to talk to you about writing’, and this you see was our introduction to creative writing. We’d surpassed finger painting and macaroni collages. It was time to attempt Words That Were Untrue.
You could tell from the look on Mrs M’s face she thought it was a waste of time. I remember her sitting off to one side marking papers while this tall man sat down on our ridiculously short chairs, and tried to talk to us about what it meant to tell a story. She wasn’t big on telling stories, Mrs M. She was also one of the teachers who used to take my books away from me because they were “too complicated” for me, despite the fact that I was reading them with both interest and ease. When dad found out he hit the roof. It’s the one and only time he ever showed up to the school when it wasn’t parents night or the school play. After that she just left me alone, but she made it clear to my parents that she resented the fact that a ten year old used words like ‘ubiquitous’ in their essays. Presumably because she had to look it up.
Anyway, Mr Scott, was doing his best to talk to us while Mrs M made scoffing noises from her corner every so often, and you could just tell he was deflating faster than a bouncy castle at a knife sharpening party, so when he asked if any of us had any further questions and no one put their hand up I felt awful. I knew this was not only insulting but also humiliating, even if we were only little children. So I did the only thing I could think of, put my hand up and said “Why do you write?”
I’d always read about characters blinking owlishly, but I’d never actually seen it before. But that’s what he did, peering down at me from behind his wire rim spectacles and dragging tired fingers through his curly beard. I don’t think he expected anyone to ask why he wrote stories. What he wrote about, and where he got his ideas from maybe, and certainly why he wrote about ghosts and other creepy things, but probably not why do you write. And I think he thought perhaps he could have got away with “because it’s fun, and learning is fun, right kids?!”, but part of me will always remember the way the world shifted ever so slightly as it does when something important is about to happen, and this tall streak of a man looked down at me, narrowed his eyes in an assessing manner and said, “Because people told me not to, and words are important.”
I nodded, very seriously in the way children do, and knew this to be a truth. In my limited experience at that point, I knew certain people (with a sidelong glance to Mrs M who was in turn looking at me as though she’d just known it’d be me that type of question) didn’t like fiction. At least certain types of fiction. I knew for instance that Mrs M liked to read Pride and Prejudice on her lunch break but only because it was sensible fiction, about people that could conceivably be real. The idea that one could not relate to a character simply because they had pointy ears or a jet pack had never occurred to me, and the fact that it’s now twenty years later and people are still arguing about the validity of genre fiction is beyond me, but right there in that little moment, I knew something important had just transpired, with my teacher glaring at me, and this man who told stories to live beginning to smile. After that the audience turned into a two person conversation, with gradually more and more of my classmates joining in because suddenly it was fun. Mrs M was pissed and this bedraggled looking man who might have been Santa after some serious dieting, was starting to enjoy himself. As it turned out we had all of his books in our tiny corner library, and in the words of my friend Andrew “hey there’s a giant spider fighting a ghost on this cover! neat!” and the presentation devolved into chaos as we all began reading different books at once and asking questions about each one. “Does she live?”— “What about the talking trees” —“is the ghost evil?” —“can I go to the bathroom, Miss?” —“Wow neat, more spiders!”
After that we were supposed to sit down, quietly (glare glare) and write a short story to show what we had learned from listening to Mr Scott. I wont pretend I wrote anything remotely good, I was ten and all I could come up with was a story about a magic carrot that made you see words in the dark, but Mr Scott seemed to like it. In fact he seemed to like all of them, probably because they were done with such vibrant enthusiasm in defiance of the people who didn’t want us to.
The following year, when I’d moved into Mrs H’s class—the kind of woman that didn’t take away books from children who loved to read and let them write nonsense in the back of their journals provided they got all their work done—a letter arrived to the school, carefully wedged between several copies of a book which was unheard of at the time, by a new author known as J.K. Rowling. Mrs H remarked that it was strange that an author would send copies of books that weren’t even his to a school, but I knew why he’d done it. I knew before Mrs H even read the letter.
Because words are important. Words are magical. They’re powerful. And that power ought to be shared. There’s no petty rivalry between story tellers, although there’s plenty who try to insinuate it. There’s plenty who try to say some words are more valuable than others, that somehow their meaning is more important because of when it was written and by whom. Those are the same people who laud Shakespeare from the heavens but refuse to acknowledge that the quote “Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them“ is a dick joke.
And although Mr Scott seems to have faded from public literary consumption, I still think about him. I think about his stories, I think about how he recommended another author and sent copies of her books because he knew our school was a puritan shithole that fought against the Wrong Type of Wordes and would never buy them into the library otherwise. But mostly I think about how he looked at a ten year old like an equal and told her words and important, and people will try to keep you from writing them—so write them anyway.
*sobs for like the umpteenth time this day and reblogs the fuck out of this*
Meg's Mumbles 