Volume 4, Issue 1: January - February, 2003

Contents Cover Story     Doctored Documents Articles     Perspective     Sue’s Review     Poem     Toon Features     Buzz     News Links     Redirect

Perspective Why “Minor” is a Hateful Term by Steven Merrick All too often in society nowadays do you hear somebody telling young people that they cannot do something they want to because of laws designed to restrict that—anything from having sex with someone they love to standing on a street corner watching the people walk by late at night. My questions are: why are younger people targeted for victimless crime laws? and always assumed to be less intelligent than the older population? Age brings experience, one may say. By that reasoning people into their eighties should be the wisest and most intelligent people. So why is it that they are so often locked away in old folks’ homes, senile or not in control of their own bodies? Well, what about people who are forty. Surely they are wise. Well, why must people who are of that age draft younger people to work for them? Why is it that they have to solve everything with war and cannot look beyond themselves (a trait often attributed to younger generations)? Some of the most creative minds exist in young people. Einstein, Mozart ... they were both prodigies at a young age. They were lucky that they lived in a time when younger people were not so looked down upon and restricted as today. If they were around now, adults would just smile down at them and say “that’s nice”, dismissing their ideas and works as things sprung from an idle mind. Children are forced to learn a smorgasbord of theories, ideas, and facts that adults have determined are what they need to know to survive. What about Benjamin Franklin, then? he never made it past the seventh grade, yet he discovered electricity. How can people then say that if you do not learn what they think you need to, you will not survive? “Minor” is used to describe people in a bad light. “You can’t stand there after 10 PM, you’re a minor.” “You can’t smoke yet, you’re a minor.” “Don’t try to vote, you’re a minor.” They are assumed incompetent—a notion that could quickly disappear if adults would just take the time to talk to their children about politics. And why should age even matter in those situations where they are not hurting anyone, or hurting only themselves? or doing only what is legally permitted for adults to do? The word “minor” in those situations is un-needed. It is just used as a pointer, as a reason to deny people of a certain age the rights that they should be able to have as citizens of the United States of America. The Constitution has always limited governmental power over the people of the United States, but nowhere does it mention the power of the adults of the United States over the “minors” that exist in this land. You have black people’s right to vote given after a long war, the Civil War. Women gained it through suffrage, but the “minors” are still ignored, all because of their age and perceived lack of ability to understand or make competent decisions about important matters. Yet, how can young adults be judged when they were never given the chance to make such decisions in the first place? How can they be told that they are too immature to do anything when nobody has given them a chance to prove themselves in those situations? Shall we begin assuming adults are too immature for their own good and make laws that restrict their freedoms to assemble, speak, or vote as given in the Constitution of the United States? If we shan’t, then why would we do that for the “minors” of the United States, who—as “immature” as they are perceived to be—are still citizens of the United States? There’s a line in the U. S. Constitution that states, “All persons.” Perhaps that should now be amended to read “All persons over the age of twenty-one,” because that is how it is now, and unless a drastic change occurs, it is how it will forever be. “Minor” will forever be a term used to insult and slander someone who is disagreed with just on account of their age. Never will they be judged on the quality of their person, or the validity of their ideas ... nay, they will just be judged on their age and age alone. No other insult is allowed to be used so freely, or in laws, so why is this one? Why indeed.