People’s political awareness does not begin when reading Plato or Hammurabi. Political awareness is not raw material and is not transmitted by blood as some try to tell us. Rather, it is usually awakened by an experience in everyday life. Political awareness is triggered and influenced by factors such as class, gender, religion, home region and the ability to access information, to name a few examples. Experiencing the winter period, for example, in a comfortable and heated home is very different from living through the winter in a home where the walls are damp and filled with moisture and you’re worried by the constant rising prices of heating fuel.
Looking at the youth of today, their level of political awareness and the extent of their involvement in political life, it’s not easy to make a general conclusion as the youth cannot be categorised as one unified force.
However, since there are some shared factors out there that do affect political awareness, a collective political awareness can be formed stemming from these factors and in turn transform into actual political force demanding change. We can take the Lebanese revolt of 2019 as an example. This uprising was something Lebanon had not witnessed before. It started from the grassroots level by the youth who would also come to lead the revolt. Despite the fact that the uprising lost pace after some time and people left the streets, the youth was able to push through some political change in the unions, at the universities and even in parliament. In my view, this generation of youth will prevent breakouts of civil wars in the future here in Lebanon.
As for now, we are living in the midst of a crisis managed and handled by the actual architects of the crisis itself. There are no solutions to Lebanon´s problems looming on the horizon. We were, after all, born in a country where we from an early age were taught that politics run parallel to war. We learned that existence must be preceded by a bloody battle of abolition and that self-evident demands have exorbitant prices that our little shoulders can’t bear. Nevertheless, we choose daily to remove political action from security threats, standing as a dam between a past that is constantly trying to bite the feet of the future, breaking the chain in its fiercest link. Perhaps statistics these days indicate a decline in the percentage of youths participating in political life, but in reality, we´re leaving psychiatric institutions to fight what our parents’ activism on the political level left us.
