Seventeen is a difficult age; awkward. It’s the time most seventeen year-olds ask what’s next and when you are seventeen you think about the future but not the way you did till then. It’s not the what-do-you-want-to-be-when-you-grow-up era; it is the: what’s you plan time.

College is an option. Sadly unreachable for a lot, merely financial reasons. Nowadays higher education has become privilege and not right as it should be. Work has also become a privilege. I mean a good job with an appropriate and dignify salary has become privilege with most young people working in modern time slaveries with minimum protection and no means for financial security and  independence.

And all that while existing in bizarre times with environmental disasters and a pandemic beating us repeatedly and from all sides.

Ovi has managed to survive through really difficult times -public and personal for most of us who contribute; and while seventeen is the age teenagers mature for Ovi it has been like …dog years, making us …eighty-four years-old! Of course we are not …eighty-four but nowadays it often feels well over sixty! Trumpism helped a lot!

Be careful, I used the term Trumpism and not Donald Trump per se. Nowadays all of us have to deal with a phenomenon that reminds more and more the mythical Symplegades (according to Greek mythology, a pair of rocks at the Bosporus that clashed together whenever a vessel went through), fake news on one side and cancel culture on the other and as it is natural Ovi found itself often in the middle of it. There are times I’m not sure how can we survive this. And that not because we are balancing in between but because even freedom of speech or what democracy stands for has become …negotiable.

But no more nagging. We are here. We are here to defend democracy, freedom, equality, freedom of speech and human dignity while always fighting fascism, discrimination, racism and oppression.

For our seventeenth birthday, a BIG thank you to all contributors and an even bigger one to our loyal readers.