The Mirror

I have been doing creative workshops with kids since 1997. Over the years I have conducted workshops throughout the country and with kids from as young as 8 to youth in their 20’s and sometimes even older; and the one thing that always strikes me is the similarity of these young people’s reality.

One of the standard discussions is about the problems facing communities and without fail –irrespective of place, age, culture or language – crime, substance abuse, unemployment, abuse and violence are mentioned. The understanding of the problems obviously differs, but most young people believe that someone else should fix these social ills.

Young people are taught and are made to believe that they are powerless and they grow up to become another generation of complacent adults who are satisfied with their lot of being transgressors or victims.

As a collective – globally – we are these complacent adults who hide behind the safe excuses we assume through experience, or knowledge, or class or race or genealogy and even gender.

We are society and this society is sick.

I am sick of listening to able bodied people saying that there is no choice; that this is how and what it is and the best and only thing to do is to try to find a way to fit into the fuck-up.

If that is what the adults believe – the parents of children and the living examples – what hope is there for any child?

How does the future which you see look? Or do the limits of your imagination prevent you from seeing the world that your child will be a part of?

Everyday millions more are born into this festering illness and parents continue to be proud and happy that they have given this disease to their children.

And all the reasons are just excuses and all the proof is just justification. Until we all decide to do something as individuals and the collective we will continue to pray for salvation that we believe is not ours within this lifetime: maybe in death, in the afterlife.

How stupid can we be? What little faith and belief we have in ourselves; how petty and insignificant we are to think that we are not deserving of any better; how limited the horizons of our dreams when all we want is what we have already been given?

And so mindlessly self absorbed that we do not care; we do not have the will or the volition to do anything unless we are told, unless a leader comes along to take us there. Is it really in our nature as a species to be this apathetic?

No! It is not! We have allowed ourselves to become these callously complacent and complicit weaklings who continue to be spectators in our own lifetimes.

And the children are the future but the future is already here, being created as you read this, and nothing will change until we start to change ourselves but that won’t happen because we all think we are right and that everyone else must be more like us, but in so doing we deny what we could be and what we could create and we kill the mere notion of humanity.