“Go and protest,” they hear from grown-ups. “You must rebuild the world!” The youth, however, choose to respond with a new ethics of gentleness.

As it hurled across the world, the coronavirus pandemic put many phenomena into sharper focus. One of them is the marginalization of the youth – ignoring their problems, chances, and sometimes even their very existence. Over the course of the past few months, the media gave most of their attention to those most vulnerable to the new disease, that is, the elderly who, in the ever-ageing West, make for a broad demographic. Meanwhile, the young have entirely disappeared from the picture. For many weeks, they also vanished from the spaces they dominated in 2019 with their relentless protests on the streets of Hong Kong, squares of Sudan, the arteries of European and Australian cities. The fear of contagion had blocked those hotheaded, often underage freedom fighters, as well as the Earth and sustainable development. Governments, police and armies have failed to contain young people’s determination. In Sudan, the regime collapsed, and the Chinese dragon is wobbling in Hong Kong. The pandemic came as a bolt from the blue.

In the age of fear of the new disease, everyone seemed to repeat the same mantra: that the young handle the infection much better and usually experience it mildly or without any symptoms at all. Therefore, no need to worry about them. Only some individual alarming cases contradict this perspective and show that the virus can be as dangerous to young people as it is to the elderly. And in everyday life, inertia and symbolic emptiness seem to be almost as fatal – having lost their tether in schools and peer groups, with no chance of possible socialization at festivals, concerts, lectures and playing fields, the young hang suspended in the void. And we have left them there.

In our corner of the world, the young are a minority: demographically decimated, politically under-represented, economically weakened, and robbed of any social security (such as pension plans, long-term contracts, or affordable housing) previous generations had at their disposal. Elites patronize them and act with indifference, all the while using them almost as if they were a commodity that must prove its usefulness. Time and again returns the old tendency of portraying kids as start-up millionaires, genius entrepreneurs sought out by top corporations, and prodigious