Amina Blackwood Meeks, ContributorSO, HERE we are, observing another 'Youth and Community Month'. Once upon a time I was a great celebrant of these special occasions.
True, they used to come upon us with more pomp and ceremony. At least with a little more notice so you could prepare for them. I grew up in the youth club at a time when there was a real youth club movement, one in which you knew of and felt connected to a host of other youth clubs and young people across the island.
November was a special time and one would look forward to the Annual Youth Ball at the National Arena, or some such venue, for the opportunity to fellowship with other young people in the company of the adults who had overseen the club activities during the year. Aahh! Once upon a time you had to have false teeth and walking stick to experience nostalgia. Well, I am very aware that there is no money in the national budget to accommodate those fanciful elaborate things from ancient days.
Money, or the lack of it, is truly the root of all evil, among them, these entities under 25 years old, whom no one seems to understand. Sometimes it seems that they do not even understand themselves, according to a teen writer in the TeenObserver of Tuesday November 2. So, nowadays these things which are supposed to have meaning just creep upon you, like age, and get treated same way, like they do not really matter. Wake up one morning and there it is in the newspaper, minister of such announces that today is the 'international day' of what it is supposed to be. Okay, fine, this too shall pass and tomorrow is another day.
Honestly, some of these special somethings have become but passing fancies and oftentimes the people for whom they are intended have not a clue that they have been the focus of attention if but for brief photo-op while. Do your own random sample survey. I simply grabbed some of the young people with whom I interact and swallowed my alarm. 'Which month, miss?' was a frequent response.
STRUGGLE AND SURVIVAL
According to one of my favourite Cuban poets, it is May, it is October, any month in which all our months are of struggle and survival. And that's how it is. Part of the challenge with 'Youth and Community Month' is that over the last few years I have never been certain which ministry will claim and exercise responsibility for it or over it. Just like our children, whose responsibility are they, anyway?
You know, while they are registered as students they have one paternity, if they are of school age but not attending school and living in endangered circumstances on the streets they might be entitled to another paternity, should they excel at a sport and make the national team they discover a whole different set of parents. And should they, God forbid, run afoul of the law, they soon discover some parents they wish they had remained permanently separated from. Furthermore, the paternity can change from year to the next. And you know how that goes, every house is run by a different set of rules.
Maybe all the parents have regular family meetings, but it seems to me that there is something missing, something that might be as basic as sustaining a relationship from a stable point of reference from which to energise, enthuse and enlist the meaningful participation of the people for whom these special occasions are declared. Otherwise, we end up with programmes that attempt to speak to or speak on behalf of persons from a distance. Just like we 'bash' our young people from a distance, because we are not engaged with them on a regular, systematic basis.
It is a recipe for engendering discontinuities in who we are. It is around these discontinuities that we all stumble. Unfortunately, our young people are even less equipped than we are with the tools for understanding and managing the rapid changes and separation anxieties and getting back on course. Where is the granny who is going to talk from beyond the grave? Where is the youth club leader you would be too embarrassed to let down? So alone and disconnected they end up being bashed for straying from the straight and narrow.
That is the primary challenge with our young people, as I see it? They are not really being raised, they simply grow up and that does not require any intervention, living things must grow, culturing them is another matter altogether. And yet without providing it for them, they are simply expected to know.
It is in this void that they become cynics, crass, crude, unable to understand us, themselves, 'whatever', and outside of the competencies to enable them to make the kind of contribution that the private sector has recently been saying they require. And that's another thing, how we treat them and each other as items of economic benefit and expediency. Concern about ourselves and them as human beings will come after the acquisition of the requisite material symbols which, lacking the foundation, they will never acquire, back to why they are not seen as worthwhile stocks in which to invest, and the cycle spin again.
EXPERIENCE AND CULTURE
Imagine the state of that community when these young people are adults. The nature of youthful experience is greatly affected by cultural and economic norms. But collectively we do not even seem to know if and how these still apply or what they are. As a consequence, we are unable to collectively plan for the benefit of, as well as to benefit from the abundance of youthful energies because the existing economic norms do not allow us to invest adequately in them.
What kind of recreation does the state make available to our children, for example? What kinds of opportunities exist for them to interact with and learn from the way adults treat themselves and each other?
Outside of the life crises in which, thankfully, community members still come together to assist each other, what is the nature of life in the communities in which they live? For too many communities it is about how the young people stand guard night after night against this or that invading force. It is about how being a 'youth' has little or no meaning outside of the numbers of birthdays that one has experienced.
Perhaps there was never a time we needed more of a focus on youth and community, in their separateness and their interconnectedness. They are both about what we are becoming. Maybe we need to declare a whole year to contemplate this as we seek to re-engineer ourselves in order to save ourselves from the deleterious effects of the collapse of community life and the distance we feel from our youth.
