Fighting Together for Connection
Emily Bloch, International Liberation Reference Person for Young Adults
In RC we say that a young adult is age twenty-one to thirty. I also lead a lot of workshops for people under thirty-five.
Referencing young adults is like referencing people on a high-speed train. We are all the time making all these decisions about our lives—like where we are going to live, what work we are going to do, if we are going to go to school, if we are going to have children, if we are going to have a partner, where our community is going to be.
We have to figure out how to set up our lives to make them workable for us. And then we have to make them workable enough that we can point ourselves toward the big struggles out in the world that we need to face together. That has to be a central part of our work.
We have to be able to work to end climate change; and racism, classism, and sexism—all the oppressions that need fighting right now. And the only way we can do that, as far as we want to do that, is if we also work on our early material [distress], and do that together.
A big part of young adults’ oppression is the message that if we can just figure out how to have our lives “just right” and comfortable enough—with the right job, the right apartment, and the right friends—then we’ll, sort of, be okay.
And a big part of our work is to recognize that it’s not about individual comfort. That’s one of the ways that capitalism has confused us. It’s actually about figuring out how to keep the biggest picture possible and fight together for connection.
We get to set up our lives so that we get to do this work together, and reach for each other.
Brookline, Massachusetts, USA