2012. We are 200,000 on the street. The government decided that it was now illegal to demonstrate. The crowd is multicolored and red with passion. We walk, and we don’t back down, even in front of the riot wall that traps us in a city that no longer wants to see us standing. Our social media allow us to link this fight to all those that have shaken the big cities of the world for a year: the Arab springs, Athens, London, Santiago, Chile, Madrid… We are the ferocious beasts of hope.
We are the youth who taste maple in a boiling boiler, who develop their field training in citizenship and who discover the taste of cayenne pepper. We are acting for our dream of a Quebec that has free education and the emancipation of minds tattooed on its heart.
2022. We are millions at home. It’s spring, in silence. We are living in the anguish of a return of the curfew, in the anguish of making an illegal movement, in the anguish of making subversive gestures without even knowing it, in the anguish of gathering together, in the anguish of loneliness, in the anguish of a collective crisis, in the anguish and fatigue of speaking out and debating, in the anguish of being associated with the wrong cause. Screens crush our daily lives and the digital overdose creates discrepancies and divisions in a weakened society.
Ten years have passed, and the lexicon of transgression associated with youth has taken a completely different direction, as have their collective spaces for speaking out and forming themselves as active members of society. A comparison of two eras that makes you dizzy.
In 2012, cafes, schools and lounges were key places to build resistance. The youth were in the streets, armed with creativity, art and unifying anthems. In 2022, young people are struggling to recover from two years of “zooming in”, confining themselves and navigating in public spaces controlled by unjustified curfews. In 2012, young people were accused of being selfish, and their occupation of the streets was quickly considered transgressive. In 2022, young people are associated with recklessness and the spread of the virus, leaving in the shadows all their sacrifices, their voluntary community involvement, taken for granted, their spaces for protest and pandemic solidarity being reduced according to the trials. policies. In 2012, the riot squad descended on university campuses, protected by shields, helmets and STM buses, ready to make mass arrests. In 2022, the far right besieges the public space for days under the calm and permissive eye of the police.
2012 gave us hope to create a Quebec and a collective world based on the common good, education and democracy. 2022 has divided us, individualized and barricaded us in fuzzy debates deaf to nuance, on unstable foundations erected on clay. In both cases, Quebec is connected to the world, that of the wave of social mobilization of the 2010s and that of a global pandemic of the 2020s.
The current situation regarding Quebec youth is worrying. With the cocktail of online schooling, social isolation, the banning of access to cultural places and socializing, we have sacrificed a generation that had a lot to say before the pandemic. We have eroded our energies, but our deep hopes remain unshakable. Young people continue to be a refreshing and innovative source for setting in motion systemic changes that are needed more than ever. Because our house is still burning.
We are the militant youth with the red square, the green circle, the blue mask. We were there in 2012, we made a rebound in 2015, then in 2020 for the planet. We are the upset youth to see our current state. Our collective mental health is deteriorating at the same rate as that of our democracy.
What remains of our collective spaces in Quebec and around the world? What social project brings us together now? In memory of the spring of 2012, we hope that 2022 will rekindle this passion of youth and that social movements will be reborn from their ashes.
*Signatories: Julie-Anne Boudreau, Alexandra Nadeau, Celia Bensiali, Maria Eugenia Longo, Stéphane Guimont Marceau, Amed Aroche, Marie-Étienne Mélançon, Mireille Hébert, Jacob Desjardins, Laurence Charton, Peter Garber, Sarah-Maude Cossette, Kelly Vu, Ipek Epikmen, Laurence Pitre-Vézina, Nathalie Boucher and members of the Montreal Youth Council