“Fight the power.”
I wish I were old enough to remember when that phrase meant something. Too many people today think those words contain some sort of fairy-dust magic that works just by screaming them loud enough. We think we’re radical because we shout for change while listening to Immortal Technique on our iPods and sipping a Starbucks latte.
Enacting any real revolution takes sacrifice, but that would just cramp our style. Generation Y is the “me” generation. We want everything now and with as little effort on our part as possible. If we really did want change as badly as the stickers on our MacBooks and the pins in our Urban Outfitter berets proclaimed, we’d be picketing in the streets instead of wasting our time playing Farmville.
Generation Y doesn’t want nor need a revolution. We like to pretend we’re oppressed, but we really aren’t. We say we don’t believe in the system, but we worked through it last November to make one of the biggest changes of the millennium. We should count ourselves fortunate we don’t have to hurl rocks to have our voices heard, unlike what Iranians found themselves resorting to last June.
Iran announced Wednesday the sentencing of five more people to death for their involvement in the June election protests. Eight so far are scheduled for execution. Every one of those condemned souls accepted and understood the inconvenient truth that comes with civil disobedience: Freedom isn’t free.
Yes, it’s a phrase as overused as “Rock You Like a Hurricane” is overplayed at Blue Angels’ air shows, but none of this makes it any less true. The “brave new world” of instant gratification and dimensionless pleasure we live in has coddled us into not considering how we would combat living under a truly tyrannical government. We’ve grown dangerously comfortable with assuming our freedoms will always be able to be defended through the system, despite living during a period of geopolitical unrest that enabled laws like the Patriot Act to be passed in a matter of weeks.
I sincerely doubt we would respond like the Hungarians did in the fall of 1956, when they took to the streets in open rebellion against their Soviet puppet government. The Soviets sent in tanks, making the position of the rebels utterly hopeless. The Hungarians kept fighting anyway, hurling Molotovs ineffectually at T-34s in the streets of Budapest. Like the Iranian demonstrators who will soon pay the ultimate price for challenging their own government’s tyranny, the Hungarians knew they were better off dying on their feet than living on their knees.
Americans don’t know what it’s really like to lose all our freedoms. It’s our greatest legacy but also our greatest weakness. We should never grow so complacent as to never fight even the most hopeless of battles to preserve our liberties.
Medill junior Carlton Barzon can be reached at [email protected].
