In the past few days, the country has been treated to exposés on youths, some reportedly still school going, discovered in different parts of the country and in diverse settings allegedly engaging in orgies. Seemingly, some of the youth attributed their actions to “boredom at home.” The characteristic reaction of the populace was that of “shock.” While the incidents are admittedly appalling, we must suspend our personal shock and be guided by wisdom that we are here as a consequence of our (in)action in the past. Walk with me as we track down the lost signal.
The absence of intentional parenting is a major contributor to the “leaderless” generation that the current crop of youth is. Our children are growing up just like trees, perhaps worse if I were to be fair to these graceful members of the flora (plants) kingdom which at least show a level of symbiotic relationships with other plants in the ecosystem in a way that is arguably much better than what we witness among humans.
Take a casual stock at what the modern families have become – parents and/or guardians are busy with work and other businesses trying to fend for their families, and thank God if there’s a house help that’s paid to take care of business at the home front – time with their own families has increasingly become that elusive luxury. Men in most part are largely missing out, decidedly fully engrossed in “providing” for the family, such that picking the bills is all that seems to matter.
At a societal level, there’s a huge void in raising the next generation so much so, that anything and everything fills this gap. The world has become such a strange place where everything goes. Mentorship and guardianship is a rarity. The available examples are often misguided from whichever perspective we look at things. The pressure the societal structures exert on the shoulders of our youth is beyond what their tender minds can effectively process and put up with. This is made even worse by the lack of support systems that will kick them out of the line of fire of the societal ills they inadvertently share in.
It gets worse when we have embraced neo-influencers and trend-setters who have nothing to show for how they got to the glorified “positions of influence”. Without anyone rising above the chaos to point the youth that are begging for guidance in the right direction, the result then becomes them being destined to fall for whatever presents itself and promises to fill the voids of their aspirations, intrigues and fun. It is indeed true that when you stand for nothing, you fall for anything.
Let us look at the law of unintended consequences. The onset of corona virus pandemic has not all over sudden made us a depraved society; corona pandemic has simply lit the fire under a lukewarm cocktail of societal ills, misdemeanors, shredded cultural and moral threads and made them boil and evaporate to the high heavens so that all of us can catch the whiff of our nonsense. This is the “Perfect Storm Fallacy” of the corona pandemic. As a consequence of the pandemic, people have lost jobs, lives and had their livelihoods disrupted. Mental health and associated effects shored up, among other ravages.
More often than not, unless some mythical being saves us the additional mental anguish, our TV stations air news with scripts that seem to be acted by souls in Soddom and Gomorrah. In actuality and sadly so, the players in these scripts are adult Kenyans witnessed disobeying COVID-19 protocols – hiding in bushes, locking themselves up in pubs and when discovered, jump from rooftops to “save” their lives while some ingenious ones find hiding places in those pubs’ ceilings.
Immorality is at an all-time high and its bed partner, drug and alcohol abuse, tagged along. The dating scene seems to be on its head – sugar daddies are barely hiding mistresses that seem a century younger than their spouses’ bones. The same is true for the other gender.
All these are lessons our youth and the next generation are partaking like Sunday school kids would biblical studies that they take for gospel truth. That’s the learning curve! Why should we then act shocked when our youngsters have perfected the art of immorality, alcohol and drug abuse, indiscipline and skewed socialization in the name of modernity? The answer is clear! No one is in charge.
It is painful to imagine the next decade with this trajectory in mind, and perhaps with yet another pandemic or a much more complex catastrophe striking that will expose our rotten underbelly, because we are yet to see the end of such. If we got more tired of ourselves, and accepted these lame excuses for our bad, if worsening behaviors that seem to blame emergencies and pandemics that visit us every once in a while, then we are doomed.
The society is sinking because we are permeated with laissez faire, if the “bystander effect” where everyone expects everyone else to “do the living” for us: the people expect the government to “saidia”; parents and guardians party their lives away, or just live with a lofty disdain to intentional parenting whilst expecting teachers to shape the destinies of their children/pupils/students for them; children on the other hand, deservedly so, expect adults to show the way where a vast majority of adults are themselves lost in some wonderland with broken moral compasses in their hands.
In order to reverse the gains of this bad inertia, the whole society, at the very least from the family level must rise to the occasion with moral re-armament to influence change. This will be foundational to any desirous changes we so wish we saw happening like yesterday. But this is sadly not like manna that drops from heaven, we must work at it. Let one be ashamed of walking out of their home(s) when that space looks like a war zone, much less with delinquents for kids and hope that someone else will bear the burden of fixing that anyway. We all must play our roles that I can hazard a guess, isn’t rocket science.
Once we achieve these fundamentals at that basic family level, only then can we hope to mesh together around meaningful national ethos, get socialized afresh with ambitious aspirations for a better future in mind. Life indeed is a serious business that mustn’t be treated casually. Once we refine the complexities of life, and live realistically as the changing times will invariably demand, only then shall we all live sustainably and live simple that others may simply live!