Advertisement
But just because I find it hard to care doesn't mean I don't care. The assertion that young people are idly apolitical is intended to neutralise our engagement and to reduce our worth to a single vote every few years.Why are so many young people bored by Brexit? Because it's boring. That much is painfully obvious. So perhaps a better question is: why is Brexit so boring? Brexit is boring because it is supposed to be boring, because it is in the interests of the neoliberal voices dominating the debate to make it boring. More precisely, it is in their interests to abstract the debate from a discussion about human lives into an interminable shitfest for policy wonks to frot themselves into a frenzy over. Capital will not be disrupted, and so the terms of the debate must be safely constrained.Old people are mostly terrible. Young people, on the other hand, are fucking great.
Advertisement
Advertisement
But as recent generations continue to politicise the personal, so we must also personalise the political. In response to the wilfully stultifying onslaught of drab Brexit commentary, we should strive to see the human suffering that will result from a referendum that is going to have an outcome, whether we participate in it or not.Vote, but don't vote on the grasping, self-serving terms set out by either campaign. Vote as a fuck-you to campaigns which have treated young people as inane, gawping, social media addicts. As though we aren't gawping at the crass bisection of our possible futures into two insular life-support machines for investment banks, as though we aren't tweeting in rage rather than apathy.We need the voices of young people to drown out the smug, self-serving rhetoric of both campaigns. The referendum has been conducted on terms that are intentionally removed from reality, and particularly from our reality as under-30s.0. But it must be wrenched out of this abstracted space and back into lethal focus.When young people take themselves seriously, you get Paris 1968, or Egypt 2011, or Hong Kong 2014. When old people take themselves seriously, you get the guy who owns Wetherspoons influencing seismic pan-European political shifts.
Advertisement