LETTER | Covid-19 exposed the unequal society that youths today suffer in

LETTER | “I was laid off”, “I wasted a semester”, “I had to move back in with my mother”, “I was broke and no company was hiring”, “I had no money to bring back food for my children”, “I had to work double shifts so I could keep my job”.

This outcry was mostly made by young people. The pandemic we found ourselves in will likely leave a generational scar. The wounds made are more severe due to the fact that our young will have to live with a great sense of loss. In the months they spent locked in, they were not just trapped physically by walls, but restricted emotionally and mentally due to a lack of physical connection with others.

Covid-19 highlights a generational scar that will continue to haunt. All of us lived through the damning months looking out the window with pain - some of us passed on. In rebuilding this generation, we need a fresh start - a bold start.

The world as we know it, the economic, social, and political spheres are in dire need of a redefinition. It needs a generational epiphany. All these years, this generation had to endure the stubbornness and pride of the boomers. The young ones had to endure being labelled ‘disappointments’ and ‘snowflakes’.

What the world needs to remember is that the millennial generation is stuck in its current reality because of the failure by the very system that has been passed down to them.

Incapable of doing something meaningful, we had to stay in our day jobs, no matter how tedious they were, just so we could put food on the table. Incapable of chasing our dreams, we had to continue servicing our student debts. Incapable of enriching ourselves with elements higher up in Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, we instead needed to take care of ailing parents who had not gotten over their own tragedies, their own emotional and mental baggage.

In simpler terms, we are stuck. How do we overcome this current problem and boldly venture into more meaningful modes of work that would enrich us physically and emotionally? How do we not feel anxious about not having enough resources to get by?

We need to feel secure so we may dare! This is the current generation's epiphany. A bold and refreshed system that allows for a social security net to manage our anxiety and a social trampoline to push us up higher than before.

We may dare when bankruptcy isn’t going to linger near and kill us alive. We may dare when our children would be allowed into quality education regardless of our income. We may dare when healthcare is guaranteed, when housing is affordable, and when basic universal needs are assured. We may dare when we feel secure.

How do we do this? We need to relook at the welfare programs we have now and improve them to become more targeted and impactful. We will need to expand the welfare state according to the needs of our population. Retraining and redeploying our labour will help generate growth for the nation.

How do we finance this? We urgently need to rethink how we tackle inequality. For instance, too many hordes of CEOs have been paid far too much for mediocre performances. The disparity between the income of CEOs and the rest of the workforce is absurd. On average in 2020, CEOs earn 141 times more than their subordinates.

Another? For too long our political-economy has been spearheaded by old rulers whose only goal has been to amass control and wealth for themselves. Our rich have been allowed to monopolise industries, leaving less than crumbs for the rest. Our legal system penalises the poor and grants pardon to the powerful. We’re barely scratching the surface here.

We have been sitting in the corner for far too long, listening to the silence, and observing the inactions. We need to challenge this now.

Only then can we incubate the right ecosystem for our young to innovate and be bold. That friend of yours who got laid off? He may start ideating his tech startup. That friend of yours who’s struggling from paycheck to paycheck? She’ll be able to experience entrepreneurship. Friends of yours with children? They’ll be able to work and have ease of mind that their kids are being nurtured comfortably at a daycare.

We have the talent. We can pool capital. We need security - secured, we may dare.