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| Why This Cause Matters |
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submitted by Speak92
Youth Liberation is not a new concern. It actually made a great deal of headway during the revolutionary era of the late 60's and 70's (which included bringing the legal voting age from 21 down to 18), a time during which other minorities were also seeking freedom from oppression. The following is an excerpt from an article by Benjamin Carter explaining the importance of youth lib, which can be found here yani.glgarden.org...
“Childhood and early adolescence are the most formative years of a human being’s life, and the time when they are most open to new ideas. This is when they are most capable of learning tolerance of people who are different from themselves and ideas divergent from their own. It is also the time when they are the most flexible and adaptable to change. As a result of this, denying them the right to develop as they will, forcing them to learn, think, and act only as certain adults permit, and requiring them to largely submit to the ultimate will and beliefs of only one or two adults, who claim this power over them solely on the basis of having conceived them and sharing DNA with them, denies youths the guidance, insights, and diversity of the entire community. This diversity would include both peers and adults other than their parents and teachers, and indirectly, the ever-distant but omnipotent politicians. This stifles their full development in ways that are too numerous to list, and thus makes it exceedingly important for them to have their full civil rights at this point in their lives. They need to receive guidance from many adults (along with their peers), rather than the near-absolute control by the two who sired them. The lack of rights during these formative years of their lives allows adults to stifle the great adaptability and creative abilities that are so common in youth so they will be unable to upset the status quo with their intellections, and be firmly indoctrinated by putative, pro-status quo biases and ideology, by the time they reach formal adulthood;
Much research has revealed that the vast majority of real abuse perpetrated upon children and adolescents of every kind, including physical, sexual, and emotional, occurs within the confines of the nuclear family unit, and often within the compulsory education system. This means that it’s actually very dangerous for youths to have virtually no civil rights during this time of their lives. Instead, the government and various child advocacy organizations, put a large amount of resources into entrapping and jailing MAAs who do not have power over the youths they are attracted to and who very rarely inflict any genuine form of abuse upon them. Chillingly, they ignore most of the abuse perpetrated upon youths by the adults who have the most power over them. Though government agencies will intervene at the slightest indication that youths are being subjected to sexual abuse in a household (both real and imagined), they tend to ignore the many other forms of abuse these youths are subjected to, unless they become outrageously extreme. Furthermore, emotional abuse, a serious issue frequently addressed by youth liberationists, is all but ignored by any agency or person who does not favor youth emancipation, as this is simply accepted as ‘discipline’.
There is a growing theory that adultism and oppression of youth is a form of prejudice that begets and enables all other forms of prejudice and bigotry, including those that are currently politically and culturally unfashionable, such as racism and sexism. Two proponents of this theory are Tony Harris and Jacob Holdt, who in their essay Insights On Oppression, state, as the heading of one section of their article, “Oppression of children and young people--adultism--is the foundation for all forms of oppression.” They then go on to say, “Adultism is the first oppression all people experience. Parents must take charge of their relationship with their children. Presenting the world as a dangerous place with murder and hurtful people along with a ‘That’s the way it is’ attitude they instill powerlessness in children. As new forms of oppressions are later introduced, we now accept them without fighting back. Born with an open, zestful and cooperative relationship to everyone we are hurt very early by this irrational behavior of adults. While we are in emotional distress, our vast human intelligence momentarily seems to shut down and the new information is stored wrongly or ‘jams up’ in a tied-up knot, and we are blocked.”
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Take Action For This Cause Support Lowering the Voting Age
At 16, you can join the army (with parental support), drive a car, go to prison, and more, but you can't vote? 16-year-olds deserve the right to vote.
by: katalinacmnacha89 on 2007-08-16 12:25:46
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