Lost youths

I'm feeling depressed with the world lately. I'm working myself up day by day into one of those funks which are hard to shake off, because they are so easily fed with so many examples which demonstrate that the world is in many ways a terrible place. It wouldn't be so bad if the world were inherently terrible; I could accept that more easily. It's that the world is beautiful, and that I love life, and it feels like all of its potential goodness is being squandered- not only squandered but distorted into unrecognizable forms. There are so many wrongs that need to be righted and it's hard to hope that they ever will be. At times like this I question why I even want to have children. Life is hard, we don't know what it's for, we don't know what to do with it. The world is a fucked up place full of mostly fucked-up lives. Do I want to inflict existence on my progeny just because I don't know what else to do? I am afraid to imagine sometimes what kinds of lives my children and grandchildren will have, what kind of world they will live in. The signs are bad.

In recent weeks, I've seen a few things which have upset me. One, I saw a perhaps thirteen year old boy eat a chocolate bar first thing in the morning at the bus stop and then deliberately drop the wrapper on the ground. Meaning, this kid lacks even the most basic concepts of ecology, pride in one's home town, and cleaning up after oneself, not to mention of a healthy breakfast. Basically, I interpret the whole thing, the eating and the littering, as this kid screaming out "I feel like a garbage can, people treat me like garbage, I treat them like garbage. I therefore see no point in trying to avoid wading through a sea of garbage." Though, of course, as a Brit, he was probably using the word rubbish as opposed to garbage. My thoughts filled me with despair, as did the feeling that nothing I could say could get through his wall of ignorance. Not even if I quoted to him from "The World Without Us," a depressing and compelling book which details how the sea has literally become a sea of garbage, millions of tiny pieces of plastic to be precise.

A couple weeks ago, I was sitting on the upper deck of the bus. Across the aisle, two teenage girls were talking and laughing, one of them playing music on her phone. At times it seemed so loud, I wasn't even sure if it was coming from her phone, or from something more powerful. I had my headphones on, and I could still hear the music plain as day. I took a headphone out of one ear, and said to the girl "Is that your music?" with a little smile. She looked at me, immediately quizzical and confrontational. "What?" "Is that your music?" I said. "But you got your earphones on, isn't it?" she asked. "Yeah," I said. "But I can still hear it." "How can you hear it if you got your earphones on?" she asked, pushing up her face. "Because it's really loud," I said. "Do you think you could turn it down a bit?" "It's not even loud!" she said aggressively. Then looked at her friend and laughed. "I asked you politely," I said. "You could respond politely." She didn't answer.

The last and most disturbing event was also on the bus. Three twelve or thirteen year old boys piled onto the back of the bus on the upper deck. They were laughing and joking and shouting, as kids do, but literally everything they were saying was an obscenity. High pitched voices, horseplay, and "you cunt! oh, you cunt!" "stop it you twat!" "Oy, your mom's a bitch!" "Fuck you! Your mom's a dog. She takes it doggy-style." Not yet full grown-men, already fully trained woman haters.

The thing that is the saddest is these kids, the litterer and the swearers, the rude girl, are not entirely to blame. They are, in a sense, victims. They are sponges who soak up the culture we immerse them in. A culture that values above all style, surface, sexiness, and possessions. A culture which places little value on being smart or spiritual or basically caring about other people. These youths are mirrors we look into and recoil from because we don't recognize what we see. There is sickness and corruption here, in our culture, in our world, and we ought to take responsibility for that. We ought to stop wondering what wrong with these kids and start wondering what's wrong with all of us.