The Most Oppressed Demographic in the Developed World

I am a straight, white, upper-middle class, American male and a member of the most oppressed demographic in the developed world.

That’s a rather cringe-worthy first sentence.  Don’t you think?  To make matters worse, it’s not only the first sentence of this post, but the first sentence of my entire blog.  When someone wonders how it all began and ambles innocently to this page, he’ll suffer an involuntary wince, followed by a wave of contempt for the entitled brat who affronted his eyes with those twenty-two words.  It’s the kind of first sentence that imperils job prospects should a potential employer dig it up.  It’s the kind of first sentence one quietly deletes years later, pushing from his mind the adage that “nothing goes away on the internet.”  It’s the kind of first sentence a writer hates to type.

But it’s true.

I mean it wholeheartedly and without exaggeration.  It is not satirical.  I don’t think the word “oppressed” is whiny or overdramatic in this context.  The demographic it references is youth.  I believe that being seventeen-years-old puts me at a disadvantage of a class unrivaled in the Western world today.  Discrimination against young people—minors specifically—is the last accepted prejudice of its scale.

If you have long been past the age of majority, you will struggle to truly imagine this, but you must try.  Imagine tomorrow you awake to find that you have lost the right to vote.  Perhaps you don’t vote anyway, but now you can’t.  If you are an American, the fifteenth, nineteenth, and twenty-sixth amendments seem to have overlooked you.  Your leaders are selected without your input, but you are still expected to obey their dictates.  You criticize taxation without representation as a historical evil, but it afflicts you personally.

Imagine next that you are suddenly banned from consuming alcohol in any quantity.  When your friends invite you out for a few rounds, you politely decline.  It annoys you to know you can drink responsibly and to see others who clearly cannot retaining the right you’ve lost.  Unrestricted people drink in front of you without apology, even though they know of your restriction.  Some of them even say that the ban is necessary for you, and they’ll confront you if they catch you sneaking a beer.

Now a law is passed subjecting you to compulsory education.  You are to memorize principles of oxidation and reduction.  You are to develop and demonstrate by written assessment an understanding of matrices.  You are to create a colorful poster expressing the salient aspects of the Colonial Mind.  You are to devote seven hours each weekday to these sorts of endeavors, except during scattered “vacations.”   Your instruction is to last a predetermined number of years, regardless of your progress.  You are to postpone your interests and your life until you are finished.  For the duration, you are expected to defer to everyone involved in providing you your education.  You are expected to be grateful.

You begin living with personal dictators who expect your total obedience.  Their right to demand it is a social institution bordering on the sacred, and politicians who declare themselves defenders of that right always score points with a major political party in your country.  Your personal dictators enforce the aforementioned laws and devise ten times that many more.  Some of the laws seem to infringe upon your constitutional freedom of religion, but you have become skeptical that the Bill of Rights applies to you.  Some people believe that your dictators’ laws are beneficial to you solely because they teach you obedience.  You could complain, but your dictators have a law against it, and you would only serve to convince them that you are ungrateful and immature.  You require the care of your dictators (you can’t work because you have years more education; remember?), and they can retract it in degrees.  This forces to you to seek their favor—or cede dignities taken for granted in a homeless shelter.

Reader, if you’ve managed to feel this, then you’ve recalled a fraction of the utter powerlessness of minors.  Your childhood may have been better than I described, but that is irrelevant.  Considered honestly, everything I wrote was legal—and I insist, common—treatment.  Even if you escaped such abject degradation by a kind attitude on the part of your parents and teachers, you should be concerned with how you could have been treated.  Our civil liberties are too important to be dependent upon compassion; they should be written explicitly into the law so that they cannot be violated.  And God help us when the law attacks them, as with the voting age, the drinking age, compulsory education, and juvenile curfew.  No other modern American prejudice, perceived or real, finds such support in the printed words of the government.

But maybe you do not accept that it is wrong to impose these barriers upon children.  The writer’s word choice was harsh to the point of ridicule, you will say.  He just made a system of school, parental authority, and delayed political participation seem like Hell on Earth.  If you are an adult who thinks so, I will not press you to accept that it is wrong to treat children this way.  Only accept that, as you stand today, it would be wrong to treat you this way.  It would be unequivocally wrong—oppressive, in fact— to require you to spend seven hours a day studying academics, to give your parents legal authority to select your place of residence, and to strip you of the right to elect your representatives.  What self-respecting adult could believe otherwise?

When you’ve accepted this, ask yourself, what is the difference between you and me?  What quality is uniquely yours that earns you the right to freedom from compulsory education and the rights to drink and vote?  Why is it that you would be justified in expressing outrage at any state intrusion on those grounds, while a harsh reactionary word from my mouth is evidence of my unfounded teenage idealism?  I want to assert that without having met me, you cannot speak with certainty on the topic of our mental differences.  It is as at least possible that a minor is as competent, responsible, and knowledgeable as you are.  This may not be true of me, but you should admit that a significant degree of injustice falls upon the young people who, behind the smaller bodies and unerupted wisdom teeth, are just like you.

Finally, I should clarify something.  We don’t oppress young people out of hate.  Most parents love their children passionately.  Biologically and socially, we are urged to protect those younger than us, and paternalism can seem a reasonable method.  There are many children—and if you go young enough this is almost universal—who take well to dependence.  They feel safe in the boundaries we have set them.  Unfortunately, the joint actions of many well-meaning people have left our minors unable to escape that state of legal and social powerlessness.  It’s torture for those who want and are ready for freedom, and as long as it remains, I will not be taking pains to quietly delete the first sentence of this blog.  We children are drowning in good intentions, but for all it’s done, I think I’d rather drown in water.

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Written: 11/24/2015