Tony Judt and the future of our youth - Power to the people

When I think about those who are in their twenties now I consider myself lucky but not because things were easier. We were still under dictatorship and suffered all the problems of this particular age but we had a future and we wanted to change the world.

We could imagine, dream and even have the luxury, or take the chance, to have a BA in literature, sociology, philosophy, history, any of the humanities that now receive less and less money from governments because they don't generate the immediate profit they require.

This is something very serious that jeopardizes democracy but this is another post.

When I watch what is happening in Madrid, hoping that it spreads in all European countries, I cannot help being happy.

These youth is in search of their future and even a present because it's being hard. Governments are ruling by corporations and for themselves in perhaps the most greedy era of the capitalist times where few buy a bag that costs three months of salary of others.

Never the word democracy has been pronounced every day for at least ten times in the hour we watch the news. Still we see less and less of the people, by the people and for the people.

I found today in Tony Judt thoughts that expresses what I feel and I'm very happy knowing that so many people are concerned with the same issues I am.

I'm looking forward to read the book "Ill Fares the Land".

I want to share with you this excerpt of an interview he gave to Terry Gross.

Dan Colman was the one who was touched by it and did the transcription from the audio (available, here or on iTunes)

"When Gross asked whether history still mattered deeply to him, the historian answered: yes, but:

"I think now, I’m more worried about the future. The past is always going to be a mess. It’s going to be a mess because it was mess and because people are going to abuse it, get it wrong and so on. But I’m reasonably confident that with each generation of historians, we keep fighting hard to get it right again. But we could get the future very seriously wrong, and there it’s much harder to get it right… I’m encountering the first generation of young people in colleges and schools who really do not believe in the future, who don’t think not just that things will get evidently and permanently better but who feel that something has gone very badly wrong that they can’t quite put their finger on, but that is going to spoil the world that they’re growing up into.

Whether it’s climate change or political cynicism or overreaction or lack of reaction, to external challenges, whether it’s terrorism or poverty, the sense that it’s all got out of control, that they, the politicians and so on, media people, are neither doing anything nor telling us the truth. That sense seems to have pervaded the younger generation in ways that were not true in my experience.

Maybe the last time that might have been true was in the 1920s, where you had the combination of shock and anger from World War I, the beginnings of economic depression and the terrifying realization that there might very well be a World War II. I don’t think we’re on the edge of World War III or IV. But I do think that we are on the edge of a terrifying world. That’s why I wrote the book." (Ills Fare thee Land)

The first chapter of Ill Fares the Land is now available (for free) on The New York Times website, and it will give you a quick feel for the issues that Judt thinks we need to confront. The complete Fresh Air interview ranges much more broadly, going into Judt’s personal experience with ALS, and I’d encourage you to give it your time. (Stream below.) Also please visit Move For ALS to contribute to a new campaign affiliated with Tony Judt to fund ALS research."

I want to thank both Tony Judt for the great thinker he was and Dan Colman for transcribing this part of the interview. I did listen and it is really amazing.

Power to the people! I dare say it now because this phrase will never, never loose it's strength just because it was a slogan of a generation. Those youngsters who are at the squares never heard them. So... Power to the people!

Update:

"For 30 years," Judt writes, "we have made a virtue out of the pursuit of material self-interest. ... The materialistic and selfish quality of contemporary life is not inherent in the human condition. Much of what appears 'natural' today dates from the 1980s: the obsession with wealth-creation, the cult of privatization and the private sector, the growing disparities [between] rich and poor. And above all, the rhetoric which accompanies these: uncritical admiration for unfettered markets, disdain for the public sector, the delusion of endless growth." Tony Judt