by Mikaela Brewer
Senior Editor
Mikaela Brewer is a multidisciplinary writer, poet, speaker, researcher, and mental health advocate & activist.
Maria Popova recently wrote that “[The cicada’s] body is the oldest unchanged musical instrument on Earth: a tiny mandolin silent for most of its existence, then sonorous with a fleeting symphony of life before the final silence.”
By early June every 13 or 17 years, from beneath the earth, more cicadas than humans who have ever lived emerge, singing for a mate with no vocal chords or lungs—seemingly no voice. For the first time since 1803, we will see a dual emergence of cicadas in the spring (over one trillion) in the U.S.
It will be an acoustic chorus “approaching the decibel level of a jet engine.”
We’re also seeing this type of synchronized song globally, singing for a different lifelong mate: liberation.
“Cicadas sing the way humans do: with their whole body.”
Nearly all young people are facing financial challenges right now, acutely experiencing unemployment, unliveable wages, inflation, debt (particularly student debt and loans), rising food costs/insecurity, inaccessible postsecondary education, housing and utility bills, healthcare costs, and low ‘financial literacy’ of literature that is laden with complicated language and jargon, just to itch the surface.
Of course, these don’t exist in a vacuum.
Young people, especially students (and their allies), have always been at the frontier of fighting for values-based economic stability. But right now, they’re inviting everyone to peel back the carpet and unlatch the secret door that says: we must climb deeper, beneath the floor of clear economic markers and logistics. There is more.
Globally, students have verbalized, posted, and embodied the recognition that our emotional, mental, physiological, and spiritual response to what’s happening around us—from the above financial burdens to multiple genocides to climate change—is healthy, appropriate, and human, rather than a personal failure or inability to navigate crises. Feeling outrage, anger, exhaustion, heartbreak, depression, anxiety, etc., are not only appropriate but necessary for change, and mean that your ‘soul switch’ is on. The sheer amount of soul switches clicked on is illuminating an unprecedented path.
We’ve seen the “great resignation” alongside a struggle to find, maintain, and hold jobs. This is further compounded by the agonizing cycle of needing to work to generate income to afford living, while being too depressed, burned out, lonely, and/or anxious to work consistently. The 2023 Toronto Vital Signs Report statistics around loneliness, worry, income, depression, limited close relationships, burnout, inability to meet nutrition needs, discrimination, and much more are heartbreaking. Yet, young people have led us in branching beyond the Medical Industrial Complex (of which the Mental Health Care System is a part) for mental health support, such as work by Dr. Jen Mullan, Dr. Raquel Martin, Kim Saira, and Cassandra Lam that focus on holistic, somatic, political, ancestral, and community-based decolonial health and healing.
Among these and many other components, there’s a profound feeling that, in a philosophical sense, financial resilience and wellness may not exist in the world as it operates right now. There is a saying that people will always “sacrifice their values in service of survival” but young people are challenging this, rooted in the value-centred belief that the world as it operates forces many people to prove their lives matter while questioning if their life is worth surviving for. This is perhaps one reason we’ve seen suicide rates continue to rise, and the catalyst for one of if not the largest global mass mobilizations for decolonization in our lifetime (in other words, sacrificing survival/safety in service of values).
Understanding where our money comes from and how we’ve been complicit in spending it in places that give back to harmful and exploitative people, leadership, policies, and practices (that we used to trust or were taught to trust), we’re able to see it as an energy, essence, or being that we either do or don’t welcome into our space/home. Protests erupt when the pillars of the pathways, structures, and systems for our lives—that we’ve long subscribed to without questioning—completely crumble, right down to the sand that built our cities and the land they stand on.
The idea that “curiosity is not neutral” has led to and allowed global access to people, research, work, digital and in-person art (novels, poems, books, poems, documentaries, music, paintings, and more), footage, photos, resources, and educational material that dethrones and unravels the central messaging and ideologies of the systems we live in—especially financial ones offering protection and safety at the cost of people and the planet, censored and hidden from us via strategies like media blackouts—enabling much deeper unpackings and questionings of the status quo.
Further, 9/11 and the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, for example, were viewed via the news—mostly through legacy media (ex. CTV, CBC, Fox, CNN). Now, we’re witnessing horror directly from the people experiencing it. Social media has allowed people to share and broadcast their experiences with us in real-time; we hear their voices and see their faces.
Another stark example is the knowledge that a percentage of our tax dollars are funding Israel’s actions in Palestine, but there is a version of this exchange with everything we buy and spend. To always be thinking of this—often unable to do anything about it that doesn’t involve sacrificing safety, well-being, or needs—can be gut-wrenching and overwhelming.
Young people are fighting back anyway. They are sacrificing their safety anyway.
Students are non-violently protesting genocide in Gaza across the globe (here are a few slides on how to support students protesting if you’re able). But they aren’t just demanding a free, unoccupied Palestine. They’re asking for a world divested from violent, manipulative, and exploitative policies, practices, and relationships.
For example, via @Toronto4Palestine (The People’s Circle for Palestine at UofT St. George Campus), these requests could be a blueprint for everyone and everything (including individuals) beyond universities:
“Disclose all investments held in endowments, short-term working capital assets, and other financial holdings of the university hereafter.”
“Divest the university’s endowment, capital assets, and other financial holdings from all direct and indirect investments that sustain Israeli apartheid, occupation and illegal settlement of Palestine.”
“Terminate all partnerships with the Israeli occupation’s academic institutions that operate in settlements in the Occupied Palestinian Territories and/or support or sustain the apartheid policies of the zionist state of Israel and its ongoing genocide in Gaza.”
Given successful protests related to Vietnam, South Africa, Sudan, fossil fuels, tobacco, private prisons, assault weapons, and more, this process is absolutely possible but with more hurdles than it seems, appearing to need time that Gaza (and Sudan and the Congo and many others) doesn’t have. Though there is likely some truth here, it is also fair to question how intentional this dynamic is, given the U.S. legislation that protects Israel from boycotts and divestment by making it illegal.
The spirit of resistance and activism among young people—a desire for systemic change; government and institutional transparency; protection of human rights; and demands for justice—is ever present through generations, echoing global economic parallels in the early 1970s.
Financial stability and our values shouldn't be things we have to choose between.
But no matter the best economic model balancing and combining business, market dynamics, and sustainability, social justice and human rights focused change requires thorough uprootings, and this movement has been a huge uprooting for many of us personally. It continues to gather strength and momentum because young people are not only more connected by the social media uses mentioned above, but have found and founded global community imaginings of the world as it could be while surviving what it is—spaces and connectivity through technology and social media. Some wonderful examples include:
Here, we might include a call to action for older generations: where are those who fought fervently decades ago, such as for Vietnam, South Africa, and Sudan? Why are so many older adults viewing protests with such disdain?
Perhaps, in the demonization of technology and resistance to using social media as a viable news/information source, the only influx of information older generations receive is mainstream media (the legacy media mentioned above or strongly influenced by it). Of course, this is not true of every member of older generations, just like ‘young people’ is not a monolith.
Yet, we ask: please remember your (and other’s) humanity. Remember the idealism of your youth.
We often speak about the mountains we need to scale, and although they are difficult to climb, they’re also hard to see in the first place when surrounded by thick rocks and deep canyons. In the past, protests, public opposition, military and political pressure, and boycotts, didn’t magically move these mountains into view. But they did create the powerful wind currents that carved them into sharper contrast, shaping the path of momentum and awareness that led everyone up the peaks. Social media is a bolstering tool that has allowed us to expedite this process, webbing together billions of voices into one force for change all at once.
Right now, young people are forced to choose between their values (frequently newfound ones) and financial stability (for example, needing to keep a job that doesn't align with these values to make ends meet). And when it comes to the global circulation of money, which includes their financial safety, they’re choosing to embody the difference between peace and liberation.
As stated by Kwame Ture (please watch this 45-second clip), “There's a difference between peace and liberation, is there not? you can have injustice and have peace. You can have peace and be enslaved. So peace isn't the answer—liberation is the answer.”
Financial stability and our values shouldn't be things we have to choose between.
Young people are not only walking this tightrope but doing it with unparalleled bravery, integrity, depth, intentionality, unrelenting love, and solidarity. They’re asking for change that undeniably risks their financial security—present and future—because both the change needed and the process of fighting for it will disrupt the status quo of how money flows.
I don’t have an answer, of course, but I see them. I’m with them. And they’re not alone. Here is a poem (with an audio episode included) I wrote at the end of March that I hope offers a bit of comfort.
The cicadas will all be dead by the end of July. This is grave to consider and hold alongside this article’s context, but as the cicadas amplify our song at a critical moment in history, they’re also pleading: we are running out of time and something must change very, very soon.
Even so, it’s crucial to remember that the cicadas will emerge again. There is an old Latin phrase, “Media vita in morte sumus,” which translates to “In the midst of life we are in death” in English (a Gregorian chant dated back to a religious service on New Year’s Eve in the 1300s, re-stated and published by many poets, lyricists, and writers, since). The reverse of this statement is also true: in the midst of death, we are in life—specifically that which we truly believe in.
As Bishop T.D. Jakes has often said in some form, “Faith doesn’t ask you to know. It asks you to believe.”
I have faith because I believe in us.
