International Liberation Reference Person for Young Adults
My name is Emily Bloch, and I am the International Liberation Reference Person for Young Adults—for people ages twenty-one to thirty. Young adults are great. Young adults are a revolutionary force. Revolutions have often been led by young adults.
When we become young adults, we finally have control over our own resources and time. Also, a heavy oppression comes down so that we don’t use those resources in a revolutionary way.
You are horrified by our lives. (laughter) And we are a little horrified by many of yours. (laughter) Our lives show just how on the edge things really are. There is a lot of instability, a lot of ups and downs. You can see where we are just hanging on. Your lives show the rigidities that you haven’t been able to work on. We are horrified by each other, and we need each other.
There is an amazing group of young adults in Co-Counseling. You should get to know us. We should all build close relationships with each other.
We young adult Co-Counselors are not yet representative of the many constituencies of young adults in the world. We need to work to change that.
I think about my job in two main ways. One is helping people figure out their own lives, because all our lives matter. Every single person’s life matters. It makes a difference. It’s valuable. It’s important. And we can’t get so consumed with own lives that we forget about the rest of the world. We need to think about how to move the world forward together.
I also think about how to get a whole group of younger people ready to lead Co-Counseling, to lead this organization. I look forward to doing that with all of you.
Brookline, Massachusetts, USA