World turmoil as the youth are cut off from their communities
Iraqis inspect the damage at the site of a suicide bomb attack at the entrance to the town of Khales, 80 kms northeast of Baghdad, on July 25, 2016. A suicide bomber detonated an explosives-rigged vehicle near a checkpoint at the entrance to the town of Khales killing 10 people and wounding 36 people. PHOTO | AFP
What you need to know:
- In Iraq, Syria and Somalia, suicide bombers have brought death and destruction to hundreds of innocent people, the majority of them Muslims.
- Islamic State in Syria and Iraq is determined to turn this world into a hellish place where fear, ignorance and blind servitude reign supreme.
- In Kenya, kids are burning down their schools.
- The fall of the Berlin Wall and the rise of neoliberalism have also unleashed self-centred individualistic societies
We live in a world that is full of pain and tragedy, and which also appears to have gone completely insane. A crazed 18-year-old kills nine people in a Munich mall. In the French city of Nice, a young man drives a truck into a crowd of people, killing 84 of them.
In Iraq, Syria and Somalia, suicide bombers have brought death and destruction to hundreds of innocent people, the majority of them Muslims.
Meanwhile, a murderous cult called Islamic State in Syria and Iraq (ISIS) is determined to turn this world into a hellish place where fear, ignorance and blind servitude reign supreme and where a few young men with guns and ammunition lord it over the rest of us.
Political turmoil and intolerance have become the order of the day in countries and regions that were once united. Britain is leaving the European Union. Some members of the military tried to overthrow the Turkish government.
Oil-rich Venezuela is on the brink of bankruptcy as people queue for food, while in the United States, an increasing number of young black men are finding themselves on the receiving end of white police officers’ bullets. In Kenya, kids are burning down their schools.
What is going on? How do we make sense of this world? How can all this be happening when the world has the technology to conquer space, to fight previously incurable diseases and to communicate with almost everyone on the planet?
Why is it that a world that has the potential to offer so much promise is now at the edge of a very dark abyss that threatens to destroy it?
A Christian friend told me that the current upheavals and catastrophes are a sign that the Second Coming of Christ is imminent, but since I am not religiously-inclined, I am trying to seek answers elsewhere.
I haven’t come close to finding them yet, but a common thread seems to be emerging: an increasing number of young people are lonely and confused; they are losing their sense of community despite having access to communication technologies that allow them to connect with people in any part of the world.
TURNING TO SOCIAL MEDIA
Real, meaningful friendships are being replaced by fickle Facebook “friends” who can’t hug or talk to you, 140-character tweets are replacing long conversations at the dinner table, and young people are increasingly turning to social media to solve their problems rather than talking to parents, friends, teachers or their peers.
Bullying on the Internet and the incessant need to show others how successful you are has created a generation of millennials who are fearful and insecure.
This has allowed all kinds of perverts, charismatic cult leaders and criminals to gain access to vulnerable youth’s minds and hearts. Which explains the radicalising appeal of groups like ISIS.
The fall of the Berlin Wall and the rise of neoliberalism have also unleashed self-centred individualistic societies that are more concerned with riches and status than with real social transformation or having meaningful lives.
Before the 1990s, young people could debate the merits and demerits of socialism and capitalism, and decide what ideology to follow, but now they can’t. We are now all capitalists, and anyone claiming to be anything else is labelled as misguided – or a terrorist.
ISIS perhaps filled an ideological void that could have been filled by the writings of Marx, Fanon or even Rumi. Meanwhile, professionalised civil society organisations have replaced popular social movements and titillating, mind-numbing reality TV shows have replaced theatre and the arts.
In a recent article, the Australian journalist John Pilger wrote that self-absorption, “a kind of me-ism”, has become the new zeitgeist, which “signalled the demise of great collective movements against war, social injustice, inequality, racism and sexism”.
However, he is optimistic that “the long sleep” of the last three decades might finally be ending. He says that the thousands of young British people who supported Jeremy Corbyn as Labour leader and the many young Americans who rallied in support of Democratic Party candidate Bernie Sanders are awakening to the fact that something very fundamental is wrong with their societies, and that their generation needs to change it.
Who knows, the most digitised generation may well be the one that makes real connection and compassion among human beings possible again.
