Switched-On :: Blog

It would be nothing short of amazing if everyone in the world didn’t have to worry about money, didn’t have to worry about their present conditions or their future. But the world doesn’t work that way, and for a lot of us, especially when the economy’s slowing recovering from the recession, we do have to worry. Of the proportion of people who can’t find a job in this economy, a lot are young people. And this is around the world, according to the UN. This means that in families who are already struggling financially to begin with, it’s hard to find a way for work-aged teens to find a source to help support their families. That’s troubling news for anyone to see, let alone youth who have to find a way to help themselves get by. So what can we do?
- Allyson

A few days ago I wrote a post about youth homelessness. I could hardly believe I was writing about such an issue as a certain phase of my family’s life involved an overwhelming sense of uncertainty over where to call home.

When my dad lost his old job (and savings along with it) years ago we really didn’t have a fixed shelter to call home. For months, we lived partly in friends’ houses, partly in a motel. It was hard to jump from one place to another without any certainty as to where we would go next. I told no one about this, and it was difficult to go to school and be asked occasionally by friends or teachers where I had lived. What would I answer?

Of all the emotions that I felt as a young child, jumping from one temporary home to another, the strongest was shame over my family’s situation. Shame because all the images I saw and all the associations I was taught as a child of “the homeless” were negative, and to become part of this classification was even more difficult to bear with.

Even if we live in a society that has become more aware of homelessness because of the global financial crisis, there is still a predominant perception of the homeless as individuals who threaten other people periodically as they wander the streets. But many are families like my own who have fallen into dire circumstances. We need to change how we see marginalized groups in society if any progress is to be achieved in social justice.

- Allyson

Right now people all over the country have one concern: money. How to make it and how to hold on to it has always been a major concerns for mostly everyone, but it seems that for the past year or so people have been scrambling even harder to find those answers. Everywhere you turn, people are talking about the economy, and a couple years back it was terrorism and then the conflict in Iraq. Does anyone even remember what the last big public concern before that? Remember that little thing called global warming with holes in the ozone layer, the sea levels rising, and movies about those poor little penguins. It’s not that people forgot that the problem existed or that they stopped caring about melting glaciers its just that it’s kind of hard to advocate for melting ice when you’re about to lose your house. The economy and trying to prevent it from collapsing is just this period’s hot topic. I’ll still remember to recycle, but that doesn’t mean I wouldn’t trade all of Antarctica for the country’s deficit to be resolved. I know that a horrible thing to say, but honestly would anyone miss it? Seriously, it’s not like any humans live there.

- Ruben