The Sound of the voices of Generation NOW

Barbed wire birds - "Transformation" by Socrates Magno Torres

“It is No Measure of Health to Be Well Adjusted to a Profoundly Sick Society”  Krishnamurti

I think one of the biggest problems is that people are using the supposed normalcy of society as a a yard stick to impose judgement upon those who are struggling to find their way, their place, their footing in this world. Why is it so hard to see the inherent normalcy in the struggle? The fact that stability isn’t always preferable to truth, when you feel like the living dead? The obviousness of wanting to escape from feeling stuck between a wall and hard place? The painful injustice that festers in ones heart when they realise that the people who told them what was what growing up had vested interests in controlling them. Why is it so unreasonable to understand the individual who supposedly has it all, who can turn around and say “fuck it” to the world, whilst wandering into the unknown because thats the only way that they can feel alive before they actually die. Why is it so hard to realise the rationality behind the words of the person who is in pain day in and day out, deciding that they would rather end their life than continue to live like that? Why don’t we question the one’s who made us assume that this was wrong in the first place?

Or is it simply that these years of humanity, are truly our first opportunity to break it all down and start thinking for ourselves?

As the generations roll on faster and faster, there’s no stopping the extent of our ability to question status quo and what has been assumed of us. We are all part of a big story, cogs in a machine that are creating something far from what we ever had a chance to choose. In one way or another, we have all been manipulated for reasons beyond us, because well, we were born into a world where the powers vested in whoever the fuck they are supposedly vested in are calling shitty shots for humanity. For sure comfort and security play a huge part in our wilful submission to be moulded and even our conscious effort to conform - and no doubt there are so many of us that agree with the need for law and order, that believe that democracy i.e. the will of the majority, is obviously a great thing! There are endless discussions about whether that is indeed the best we can hope to achieve for our sapien selves, knowing very well that the majority is more than often fearful if not ‘wicked’ and oh so easily manipulated. Combine the illusion of free will with the rhetoric of democracy and you get a game that is playing us as the empowered when really we are still just pawns in a much bigger, much greasier, gassed up oily machine that is chugging away at the earth’s resources.

Today, there are a growing number of us that feel not only do we have nothing to lose by speaking up, that the very essence of our soul depends upon our courage to say STOP. NO. WHAT THE FUCK. THAT’S WRONG. I’LL DECIDE FOR MYSELF. I have personally spent my whole life being like that, it came completely naturally to me and I had no inkling that there was something unusual about it - much to the dismay of most of the world around me, and most definitely much to my discomfort. When I was 10 I decided to take the negative position on the primary school debating team that argued the phrase “Dont upset the apple cart’ and had a deep affinity with all the amazing beings like Gallileo, Socrates and Rosa Parks. I knew which side I was on from then on. I was a dissenter and proud of it! What I didn’t realise, as a young outspoken-come-angry little girl, was how my rage was being experienced through the lens of society.  That despite the somewhat changing way’s of our world, I was essentially compromising my femininity and simultaneously challenging the authority of masculinity - and that this was quite possibly one of the greatest causes for ostracism that had ever existed. So much so, that completely different communities, who don’t necessarily agree on anything at all and have even fought and killed each other for eons. can bond over women’s oppression and subsequent ostracism. Women have been the bottom of the human chain for a long long time, and being born into a supposedly FREE world has often left us bewildered and confused as to our identities. The foundations that built us, though covered with the waters of Western uprising, are still the pillars of our society, the underpinnings of our assumptions, judgements and experiences. Until we recognise where we have come from, we have no ability to see ourselves for what we have become. Take the Hasidic community for example. It never existed in this way before World War II. It is one of the tightest, most exclusive, righteous and ostracising communities in the world, that defends its ways through the armour of protecting that which was almost destroyed in WWII. Ironically I see this way of behaving as a key factor in perpetuating the unfortunate cycle of anti semitic persecution, and without a doubt, as another institutionalised justification for the systematic oppression of women.


Where have our beliefs lead us and what does it take to wake up and chose for ourselves?


For some people, choosing to explore life in order to be able to make educated decisions is simply not possible. Many of us have been robbed of time, money and independence and to take a leap of faith out of our communities is just another way of committing suicide. So many poor parents being sold on shelter and food in exchange for the souls of their young muslim children’s Jihad education has already lead us into territory that is more dangerous than we can even imagine. There are so many people out there who simply cannot speak up, cannot choose another way, cannot say STOP. We must first acknowledge the inherent struggle that exists inside humanity to think for ourselves, in order to realise what we are - players in a game full of rules that we didn’t make up.
Through each and every generation there have been people who have broken the rules, who have spoken up, who have risked their lives, compelled by some strange unafraid force, to stay integral and true. Today there are more of us than ever before and this includes the ones who are still unable to find their voice but know that if they could just do it, if they could just speak up, they would tear the fucking place down. Pain has a voice. Suffering has a voice. Oppression has a voice. Ordinary fucking depression has a voice.  These are the voices that make up the song of change, the most empowered beautiful song that this world has ever heard, and its time for this chorus to find its way to the airwaves.. and bring the house down. Its time to break down the walls they built around us and build ourselves a huge open air amphitheatre!


I often wonder what I’m here for. What’s the cause that calls me, there are so many.. do I have to choose? What’s my purpose, why am I here? Sometimes I get flashes of possibilities - like now. Decidedly, I’m here to hold space for the masses to speak up. I am here to say that YES, we can go out  on a limb by ourselves and survive, we can educate ourselves beyond our schools and universities. We can explore life outside the bubble of our communities, outside the safety of our homelands, outside the comfort of our personal beliefs. Im here to say that at some point we must risk our very selves to speak up today before the window of opportunity is gone. We go on assuming that change is slow and freedom is forever… but we have no reason to think this way. Everything can and will change. Nothing is a given! This is it, we are on schedule and maybe just in time… Born with voices to booooooom - not a second too late.