A Skinny Take: Youth, Dante, and The Rotten Carrot of Hope

Blog by Ryan Gallagher | 30 Jul 2009

In the first of a new fortnightly feature on the blogs, all dissecting and discussing this wider world around us, Ryan Gallagher has hope in our youth. Someone should.

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Most people spend their lives hoping. Some for a light at the end of the tunnel, or for six lucky numbers to appear from their television set on a Saturday night. Or just simply for good news to end a bad day. But what happens when this hope – something so essential to the human psyche – is gone?

To answer this question, as a starting point, you may wish to consider the tales told by those who were young throughout the 1930s. This was a generation sponged in layers of false hope, only to find themselves suddenly lost to grim realisation as the mythic fallacy of the American Dream unfolded in front of their eyes and the Great Depression took haunt throughout each avenue and alleyway.

Fast-forward several decades and, in the midst of the current recession, events repeat themselves. Bankers are vilified, jobs are lost, homes are repossessed and people begin to realise that the values upon which their society is built are as flawed and as crooked as the politicians who perpetuate them. Hope then dissipates and a state of apathetic paralysis becomes the norm, with the youth seemingly hit hardest.

Yet such disillusion, principally amongst those young people not in employment, education or training, is hardly a surprise. Just consider youth unemployment rocketing to almost one million in recent weeks – now at its highest point since 1993 – and all with all intentions of rising further. To be a young person at this tumultuous point in history becomes, for many of us like being stranded on Dante’s mythical Mountain of Purgatorio, eager to reach an Eden at the top, but lacking in crampons.

Instead of Satan though, there is Rupert Murdoch, instead of Casella there is Lady Gaga and instead of angels there are the likes of Canadian journalist and campaigner, Naomi Klein. But our Mountain of Purgatorio is itself difficult to identify, its existence invisible to the untrained eye. While our youth stasis is undoubtedly felt and experienced, it simultaneously seems to have no concrete face; a fact that only amplifies our confusion

The point is that like Dante’s mythical, theological narrative, in reality we can also at times in our lives feel stranded between two worlds – perhaps not surrounded by fire breathing demons or floating angels serenading us with beautiful lullabies (speak for yourself - Ed), but trapped all the same between a past that is now behind us and a future that lies ahead of us like a carrot on a stick.

But while youth has always, at least in modern terms, been a biological stage at which one feels much in limbo – no longer shielded by a cloak of childhood innocence, yet still unable to grasp the responsibilities of adulthood – the distinction is that in periods such as this, like the 1930s, the carrot appears to be dangling out of reach; or worse, it's rotten.

Nevertheless, despite this rotten vegetable, we find our pesticide and remain in relative tact. Whilst Dante’s eternal words might recommend that we “Abandon hope” they might also remind us to “Remember tonight, for it is the beginning of always”. In other words, the future has not yet been written; you may abandon hope today – but you might rediscover it tomorrow.