'The lost generation'

'The lost generation'

I hear the rhetoric almost every day ‘today’s youth is lazy, today’s youth is entitled’. To an extent that may be true, but set against the logic of the proponents of this message, it couldn't be further from the truth.

<Pic sourced: www. www.saha.org.za>

Here’s what I mean by this. The main argument to the noise about ‘this generation’ being filled to the brim with lazy and unimaginative youth is because generations such as that of 1976 are used as a comparative device. 
What these people forget is that the militancy, awareness and resolve of that youth was not up to the individual, that simply means that a person did not have to be an avid reader or a follower of current affairs or partake in community engagements to know about things, no. The issues were tangible and right there in their faces.

No matter how lazy or ignorant someone was, there was absolutely no way that they wouldn't know about the state of emergency in the late eighties, because they were security forces in armoured vehicles patrolling the streets on a daily basis to constantly remind them of that fact.

Today’s youth is a direct reflection of the broader society which has ceased to care about the well-being and progress of the collective and instead focuses on the self. 

The reason why people don’t join others and campaign against injustices today, is simply because they are better off. People will not go to the streets or join a petition and protest against youth unemployment or the ludicrous Electronic tolling system because unlike the majority, they have a job or they can afford to pay.

What happened to 'a person is a person because of others' ?

<Pic sourced: www. funny-pictures.picphotos.net>

The sooner we realise that regardless of the fact you or I are in a better state in comparison to the next person, is the sooner we’ll know that what affects ‘us here’ and what affects ‘them there’ affects everyone throughout the length and breadth of this country.

 The same youth which is not at school or at work is the same youth which will hold you hold you up at gun point, so the notion that there is a ‘them’ and an ‘us’ is baseless and at worse short-sighted and un-South African.

When the youth through the decades saw that the majority of blacks sat uneducated, oppressed at the work place and ostracised in public, they didn't fold their arms and say ‘ at least my family or community is better off ’ no! They instead made it that their fight, hence our history speaks of such events as the bus boycotts in Alex, the defiance of the public gathering ban in Langa (http://www.sahistory.org.za/topic/sharpeville-massacre-21-march-1960) years later and the well-known 1976 uprisings in Soweto.

Furthermore, this resolve from the youth of yesteryear could also be seen in the older generation of that time. When members of the united party broke away from it, after the rejection of the proposal to return land to the black majority, to form the progressive party ( http://www.da.org.za/why-the-da/history/). They actually didn't have to. They were white and privileged like the rest of their kin, but they chose to break ranks in Solidarity with the oppressed black majority.

In summation. The above-mentioned, is the exact spirit today’s youth should espouse. Failure to do this will render us worthy to be labelled with a much worse title than that of ‘the lost generation’.