BRsq.org Reason for Being

  Giving voice

     Fresh out of high school, I began writing guest columns for the Canton Repository, but I'm odd. The lack of young people who write formal opinion pieces is disheartening. The media seem to have no faith in a person's opinion until half his hair is gone.

     Young people have great ideas - the buds of future progress. To give just one example: Benjamin Franklin was 16 when he wrote his first column for the New England Courant. His articles, published under the pseudonym Mrs. Silence Dogood explored granting women access to public education and the ideals of the First Amendment - some 50 years before independence.  

     But frankly, young Franklin's writing doesn't have a lot of punch. It doesn't have the power of a revolutionary. It lacks the stick-it-where-the-crown-don't-shine spirit. Also missing in Franklin's columns are facts, facts we often have at our fingertips today via the Internet. Granted, appeals to emotion and reason are types of arguments that do not require cold facts or statistics. But facts, like grammar and vocabulary, are the opinion writer's tools. They help us make our point.

     In Franklin's piece about allowing the poor to go to college, having the   stats about college attendance in the colonies certainly would have made the   issue more tangible. (In 1790, one in 4,000 people was enrolled in college.) I know we can outdo the young Ben Franklin as a commentary writer, and my hope for this section of BRsq is to outdo today's media in giving young people a voice. Crusty old white men like George Will and Paul Krugman are fixtures in   opinion writing. But their light bulbs won't glow forever. We need fresh ideas   and new faces. We need people who are trying to find a way to pay for college during the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression; people who are growing up in the age of terrorism and trying to define it; people who know what post-industrialism is, even if they don't know exactly what the word means.   

     This is who we are. We are young and bold and finding our ways in life. Many of us have the fire and punch of the older, revolutionary Franklin but few outlets. We want to improve our communities. We want to promote our values, varied as they may be. We seek ways to add our own perspectives to national and global debates.  

     Our opinions grow ever more important as we become adults, and should not   be dismissed. "You're too young to understand" is a cop-out of someone who just isn't explaining the topic well enough or wants to avoid it altogether. We can understand as well as anyone, given the opportunity. We should demand the opportunity to understand the world around us. After   all, we are the ones to inherit today's messes and protect today's blessings. We need to understand what we're getting ourselves into.