The time has come to correct the saying that “the world rests on the young”. Because that’s not true – they only have as much of the world as us, elders, left them with. And we left them with a mess.

Voja Žanetić

One of the most necessary monuments in the world is a huge marble slab, placed above the assumed level of water on the planet when global warming ends. It should say “Sorry”. If nothing, it would be good for those who live then to know that us, living in the now, know what we did wrong. And at least that we are sorry.

And we have reasons to apologise. We spoiled the climate, gave democracy up to money and interests like never before, those of us who have food to eat throw away more than we have eaten, we produce more than we are able to buy and spend, we pollute and exhaust the same planet that we have overpopulated. We enrich the popular, we make the rich popular, and we make the politicians – the increasingly unworthy middle class between the previous two – richer and more popular than they have ever been, turning their families and descendants into the bearers of renewal of this unfortunate emerging feudalism.

All this, of course, rests on the condition that the aforementioned finger, used to start wars and bombs, which very often is not attached to a hand at all – stops itching. In the cosmos of their own almighty idleness, at least a few of them are thinking right now if they could still touch that one switch that has not been allowed to be flipped until now. I guess that in that way as many people would be sent to their deaths as is considered a worthy enough sacrifice of our own finality.

As we said, the world rests on the young. Which world? This one?

Boom.

* * * * *

The world and the countries in it are currently ruled by – let’s be honest – mostly very ambitious self-loving old men. Greedily clinging to a lot of power, they are currently actualising the idiotic intention of leaving behind their own long-spent selves a future that they personally neither had nor could have imagined. Consequently, international politics right now is, to the greatest extent, a weapon-backed cry for lost potency, while the international economy is a mere accumulation of money in accounts of those who will not and cannot spend it in a hundred lifetimes. Actually, not even in one lifetime, which is being spent rapidly as we speak.

Therefore, the topic of this issue of our portal magazine – which talks about the participation of young people in political life – can be changed, at least for the introduction. Let’s freely consider how necessary it is for the elderly to participate in politics.  Spearheaded by the signatory of these lines.

Not at all?  Yes, not at all.

Ageism? Yes of course.

And probably not enough of it.

* * * * *

How, then, is a planet on which the dying (or those with a fear of death transposed into a complex midlife crisis) determine how long and how others will live, managed? It’s managed by surrendering the management  (and certainly the exclusive right to vote) to all those who have no fear of the grave, oblivion, or the cessation of all power – from ideological to physical. To all those who will create the world according to the years ahead, the families they will create, jobs they will do without slave labor, health that will not be wasted by the fumes and deposits of hyperproduction and hyperconsumption. To young people, then. And only them.

And if anyone thinks that the elderly still know better, just look at the news these days – consider the situation from Yemen to Ukraine, absorb the opinions from social media about issues ranging from vaccination to the shape of the country. Or measure the ice on the polar caps or think about this, just past, hottest summer since temperatures have been measured. If anyone even thinks that the world around us, in spite of everything, should not be led exclusively by the people who will continue to live in it, they should find another pamphlet, completely different in content and less deliberately angry.

Because this one has reached its end.

That’s all on youth in politics.