Jamie Speka, West London Socialist Party
I was born in the USA right before 9/11, and I grew up in the haze of the Iraq war. When I was seven, I watched as the recession saw my parents struggle with job security.
After joining my parents at a party to celebrate Barack Obama’s election, we watched as he bailed out the bankers. My health insurance didn’t cover a surgery for me, so I had to go without.
Held captive to the decisions of politicians and bankers, my parents keep finding their social security depleting, inching towards retirement in their 70s. This is no way to live.
But my parents were never ones to sit and watch. When I was three, I was at my first anti-George Bush demonstration. At eight, I shuffled along the steps of the county courthouse to watch my dad play ‘Union Maid’ on guitar. I stood with the teachers’ union alongside my mom to protest the administration.
Growing up, I got used to the school-shooter drills. The unprecedented days off school that came from unbreathable air pollution, as the largest Californian forest fires in history – fuelled by global warming – raged around my town.
We staged student walkouts to draw attention to the environment, sat in protest during the national anthem at school, marched for the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement, and looked with hopeful eyes towards our future.
My generation was filled with hope. But it’s been systematically dismantled by politicians following the money trail.
One would think that decades would have made a few budges in the political puppeteering manoeuvred by billionaires. Or maybe there would be safer gun laws, eight years on from the national school walkouts. Is it conceivable that five years after BLM, the sitting president blamed crime rates on immigrants’ “bad genes”?
Seeing no tangible changes can reinforce the belief that what we do is nothing, compared to the avenues that the rich are given.
The solution is found in a bottom-up approach, that doesn’t sell democracy to the highest bidder. A solution is to do away with a money-hungry world that gives the 99% no voice. To fight for a workers’ party, and to bring an end to the exploitative, divisive capitalist system.
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