Interns’ Corner
This article by Mira Rifai and Jenny Horsburgh appeared in our summer 2015 MAPA newsletter.
Mira Rifai
Cambridge Rindge & Latin School
Teenagers are the future leaders of the world, and it is our obligation to fight injustice while we’re still young before our turn of controlling the world comes. We need to be ready to face the real world by fighting the injustice that people have to live through every day.
This generation of teenagers is made up of many passionate people who want to work together to eliminate what holds us back from being a loving and caring world. We could be a whole different story with the recent
movements and unity that young people have demonstrated. We, teenagers and adults, must stand together side by side to fight against the injustice that millions and generations after generations have quietly suffered. We need to set aside the fear of the consequences of fighting injustice — they are not nearly as hurtful as the consequences of injustice and racism.
We have the power to use our voice to make a difference not only for us, the people of tomorrow, but generations after us to come and to show them that their voices also always count. The people united will never be defeated!
Jenny Horsburgh
Newton North High School
I’m a sophomore at Newton North High School — generally known as the girl who rants about politics. I belong to Divest Newton, which began as a student club at North, and then became a broader local coalition aiming to convince the city of Newton to endorse state divestment of pension funds from fossil fuel stocks.
Divestment is a hopeful movement and a powerful symbolic action–saying fossil fuel stocks are no longer safe or acceptable to invest in–but it is only one facet of a greater surge of action and change.
Other aspects of this could include a tax on the release of too much carbon into the atmosphere. We could have subsidies for the renewable energy sector–and end those for fossil fuels. We could launch campaigns to take back our energy grids. With a saner budget, we could demand back the money handed to the military and the ultra-rich, and use it to keep this planet alive. And we must remember the links and exacerbating effects climate crises have with other issues–racism, inequality, poverty. The little steps, better light bulbs or more efficient cars, can’t be our end-all-and-be-all: there’s a whole system out there standing in the way of a better world.
This system is insidious, but it’s not hidden. It’s in the ten times more money going to the military than education. It’s in the trade agreements that would allow corporations to sue governments for lost profits. It’s in politicians bought and sold by corporations. It’s in the way our cities and communities wither while the wealth divide grows.
It’s in the majority of fossil fuels that we cannot extract if we want to keep this planet in livable condition, but which the fossil fuel companies fully intend to burn. It’s the deadly absurdity of the world we live in, and it is beyond clear that we’ve got to change it.
As part of the generation that will inherit the wreckage of this earth, I can say that all my life I’ve grown up in fear of the future. I see the climate becoming chaotic and volatile, and all around me people either wring their hands or close their eyes, and act like everything is going on as normal. Kids my age tell me “I hate politics,” and I tell them, so do I, but you can’t live in apathy just because the world looks prettier from there. Nothing will change if you avoid it or don’t care. Instead, trillions will keep being spent to fortify a structure that has no place in it for most of us, no place for the sustainable ways of living we might otherwise build. Maybe we can’t change everything in time, but if we don’t try, to quote the punk rock band Bad Religion, “the arid torpor of inaction will be our demise.”