In Burma the gangs have different names. But they’re there. The void of young adults is proof enough. And if that’s to be the measure, they must be growing. Or dying.

In Rangoon these days, you can hardly find someone between 19 and 25 in public. Not without a uniform at least. A striking fact when you consider approximately 40% of the young country is under 25. You won’t find college-aged men and women in lecture halls, milling about the quad, searching for their soulmate or the next beer bong. Institutions of higher education have been closed since August. According to the Chronicle on Higher Education, they were never that stable to begin with. (I bet it was the beer bongs! Those confounded beer bongs…)

Young Burmese have had to find different outlets of productivity under a military regime that stretches back to the ’60s. Some kids join the oppressors because they can’t beat them and they’re tired of getting beaten. Always hungry for more impressionable minds, more desperate bodies full of piss and vinegar, the junta equips these youth with green helmets and olive get-ups and cold steel machine-guns. They’re 400,000 strong now, and they’ve got bottomless barracks. Some even small enough for 12 year-olds.

On the other side of the train tracks, other young men are lured by the gang of faith — the Buddhist monasteries. They’re also 400,000 deep. And they’ve got room for little ones, too. Contrary to our popular belief, monk-hood is not a lifelong commitment. You join at will, and can leave at will. So for those opposed to the regime, especially in adolescence, it has become a rite of passage — a sort of Burma Peace Corps. Not far from the American concept of “paying your dues.”

Outwardly, the monks seem to have the power of keeping the junta in check, and that makes them a popular team for the young and floundering. The initiation simply means a taking a razor to your head and forgoing your scarce possessions in favor of a robe and an alms bowl. And then you have it — an official enemy and an official gang and an official color — saffron. Suddenly, the unemployed and uneducated, repressed and aimless have something to do. Suddenly, they have group to which they belong.

On either side, these gangs, like ours, fill the void of community and of identity. In a land that can’t teach its young what home means or where it is going, these colors allow them to pick teams and find direction in numbers. In the absence of sports fans and band groupies, the Burmese youth — in Green or Saffron — fill in the ranks of the blindly dedicated. Blind even to their brothers on the other team. Committing acts that violate the laws and livelihood of their former- and would-be- classmates in another color.

Because there’s nothing else for them to do. They can’t find work. But they’re still looking for self-worth. Like any growing and learning human being, these young Burmese are trying to prove that they have a place in society.

A society that is intent on swallowing them up, one generation at a time. With the myth that conflict leads to change.