Wednesday 22 May 2013

softly, softly ...a gentle but insistent boom, boom, boom...time for a different drum...

Hey, let's change the world today! Let's creep around and move the furniture, straighten the pictures.
It's time we got serious about what is going on with the next generation of Australian teenagers. The current batch are about to discover that the Baby Boomers are reworking the middle-age exit plan and being as reluctant as they always have been to follow their predecessors. There is no way they will sit and be old when it is their turn. The horror of aging is not about plumping up the flesh for today's 50-60 year olds, but about not being heard. Our teenagers are very noisy themselves, but they don't know what to make a noise about. There is not much left to begin. They are left simply to reinvent, to recycle or in many cases to destroy.
ADHD,ODD,ADD......deficiencies, destruction, devaluing, defacing, desperate and downward....
How to get them to be creative?
How to give them hope that deconstruction is not their only lot?
Is there any merit it telling them to go back to 'truth to materials'?
I think it must all begin with going back to respect for the 'temple'...the physical body.
Friends and I were looking at photographs of ourselves in our 20's. someone commented on how 'wholesome' we all looked. (That's the attraction of Mad Men, isn't it?)
Yet we know that we were subject to eating disorders, depression, cancer, anxiety and mood swings BUT not at the age of ten, eleven or twelve. And it didn't define us.
Our youth are no healthier, smarter or psychologically fitter than many children of the Third World.
And they have a far less savoury regard for education, family values or their elders.
So let's start to fix it. How? Start the dialogue people. Begin to push back. Warmly, gently, quietly.
Grandparents.... redirect the values of the young...maybe, just maybe if we stop fussing about clothes, wrinkles, bunions and grey hair, bake something wholesome (get rid of those damn trans fats!!!)and turn off the news for a while, we can get them to stop comparing themselves in a frenzy of Australian Idols and just be kids.

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