Our Generation Mumbled. This One’s Got a Microphone.
A 17-year-old student and his mates stood up at a school assembly last week and called out racism, homophobia and toxic masculinity to a room full of their own mates. Voluntarily. To the exact crowd most likely to give them grief for it.
The lead singer’s nam, is Rex Wardle, and the band is Trophy Wyfe (ironic? Yep!) – a three-piece out of Whitebridge High in Newcastle. Last week they won Triple J’s Unearthed High, beating more than a thousand other acts. Standing room only at the assembly and the message delivered loudly. The winning song is called ‘Spiders.’ It is a beauty and it names the ugly stuff a lot of young men have decided is just a laugh, and refuses to let it slide.
Now if you’ve spent any time online lately, you’ll have been told this generation is cooked. Addicted to screens, soft, feral, the reason civilisation’s going down the gurgler. And the media are feeding it. Pick your flavour of doom; there’s a podcast or post for it.
And I get the anxiety. I’ve got two teenagers in this game too. But what the doom merchants conveniently leave out is that this is the kindest, most switched-on, most justice-hungry generation we’ve ever seen. They call out behaviour our generation just mumbled about and walked past. They’ve got a radar for hypocrisy that would strip paint. And they are using it.
Which is exactly what Rutger Bregman would tell you to expect. Bregman wrote Humankind, built on one gloriously inconvenient idea: most people, most of the time, are decent. Not naive-decent. Decent in the way that holds up when you check the facts. He dug into the famous stories we tell about how rotten humans are and found most of them are exaggerated, badly run, or flat-out bullshit. The savage was never under the surface. The decency was. It’s just that fear sells better than friendliness. We got this far because we’re wired to cooperate. To side with each other. To give a stuff.
That’s not wishful thinking. That’s a hundred thousand years of evidence, and these kids might be the sharpest edge of it yet.
And Rex didn’t find that microphone by accident. Whitebridge ran a ‘live lunches’ program – kids playing in the music room, then out at the local clubs. The school decided creative arts mattered and they fostered the hell out of it. That platform is important. Decency doesn’t shout into a void; it needs a stage and a few adults – in this case, teachers built the live lunches idea and then they got out of the way. Give a kid that opportunity and watch what they do with it.
Every generation reckons the one behind it will ruin everything. Every single one. And every single time, those kids grew up and made the world fairer, kinder, more honest than the one we handed them. That’s not a vibe. That’s the trend line. For centuries. And this lot? They’re not waiting until they’re grown to start.
Trophy Wyfe just translated it into a great rock n roll song and won a national competition for it.
So next time someone tells you the kids are the problem, send them the song. Tell them to turn it up and then tell them to read Rutger Bregman’s Humankind.
The kids are alright. They’re better than alright.
We’re the ones who keep forgetting.
