Global Dialogues

In the Broadway musical Hamilton, Aaron Burr delivers a line in Act II that has long haunted me: “I want to be in the room where it happens.” The line captures a longing, where Burr is forced to watch history unfold beyond closed doors. To Burr, this reality captures ambition, but for my generation, it's about survival. There is a very specific kind of grief that comes with inheriting a world on fire. It's not that of sudden loss, but of the slow-burning ache of watching a system fail in real time, knowing that it was designed long before we even drew our first breath, in rooms we were never meant to enter. 

Young people today are inheriting the consequences of those rooms. War is negotiated without our consent, economic systems deepen inequality, polarization strains democratic norms, and we watch as crises are deferred by decades. Our generation has grown up with climate countdowns on our phones, seen war and conflict livestreamed, and inequality quantified in our algorithms. We don’t read about global crises in history books, we live them every single day. For my generation, distance is a luxury we cannot afford. Therefore, we approach challenges through a lived proximity rather than abstraction. We approach global issues systematically and with urgency. We see our problems as overlapping systems that shape real bodies and real communities and very real futures. So, we want to be in the room where it happens because we’ve spent our lives living with what happens when people like us aren't there. 

Elevating youth voices, then, requires more than just offering us a microphone after decisions are made. Because that is not elevation, it is performance. We demand more than symbolic inclusion. We want to be in the room where frameworks are drawn and priorities are set. And I think that is important because we bring something the world desperately needs: the audacity to imagine that things could be fundamentally different. We push dialogue, inclusion, importance of lived experience, and an ethical responsibility so that we may live a life moving forward not backwards. So we shouldn’t be consulted, we should be consequential to the plan. It means trusting us with real responsibility and authorship, and a fundamental restructuring of how we as a people approach global problem solving.

So, what would it look like if we did have a seat at the table? Imagine if every climate policy required sign-off from a youth commission before its implementation. Imagine if university boards included students with voting power on decisions. If international negotiations on digital regulation had to justify their choices to the generation that will live with the landscape they’re shaping. If global challenges are shaped by human decision, then the future deserves to be in the room where it happens.

Tara Curtin (N'28) is a junior at the Berkley School of Nursing at Georgetown University.