Whistleblower

As I ascend the dust-laden stairs to the second floor of an old industrial warehouse in Los Angeles, I am engulfed by a pulsating energy. At the end of the hall is an office, filled with the exuberance and beauty of a generation demanding change, this is the place where I discover what I am living for.

Shiny whistles hang from the necks of revolutionaries, each with its own flair symbolic of the radical to whom it belongs. The whistle draped around my neck had once travelled thousands of miles from this very warehouse to reach me in my small rural town in Australia. It hung from my neck day after day until finally making the journey back to stand beside its brothers.

Each one of us is a whistleblower, our main goal is to end the world’s longest running war and bring peace to the Democratic Republic of Congo. The organisation calls itself Falling Whistles, with them comes a story of boys to small to carry guns, given with nothing but a whistle and sent to the front line of a blood curdling conflict. The whistles worn by the campaign and supporters alike are a re-imagining of those the boys wore and act as a symbol of protest, the proceeds of each sale going towards rehabilitating women and children affected by the war.

A collection of people not one over the age of 30 work in a warehouse in downtown Los Angeles, believing they can effectively change the world. “Oh, the imperiousness of those children” the world says. But that doesn’t change a thing, what world doesn’t understand is that while we are children, we are children who no longer wake up each day and decide that we are living for ourselves. No, we are living to see change within our planet to stand up for the rights of human beings and given them a fair opportunity at mortality. If there is one thing we have learned it is that if you want something changed, you need to change it yourself.

Blow your whistle.