Youngsters Need Guidance – As I did!
Peter Hendricks, Cape Town – A message from the recent Synod on Youth was “listen to young people”, and this is true, but many young people haven’t passed first base yet.
Bill Gates gave a fine lecture to high school students on things they would never learn in school. One of them was this: “Before you were born, your parents weren’t as boring as they are now. They got that way from paying your bills, cleaning your clothes and listening to you talk about how cool you thought you were. So before you save the rain forest from the parasites of your parents’ generation, try delousing the cupboard in your own room.”
Youth today want to march to their own drum. They want to make their own Ten Commandments.
Talk the Talk, But Haven’t Walked the Walk
Look at sports stadium events for the young: the drink flows free, and the drugs are not far behind.
Look at teenagers’ clothes: young women try to get into a dress three times too small, and youngsters spend a fortune on jeans with the knees cut out and the behind in threads. That is superbrains!
Many young people talk the talk, but haven’t walked the walk.
Take the so-called liberated women of today. They want more say in the Church, the workplace, and in sport.
Yes, with the right looks and the right body, young women will chair discussions on professional sport, never having played any.
If you want to talk about walking the Great Wall of China from start to end, you must be able to say you’ve actually done it.
Moral Content
Take women, real women, who have done it: our mothers, and religious nuns, for example. Such women are the mainstay of the Church. They are the cactus that greens somewhere in the desert heat, and when it blooms, spreads its perfume into the night air.
After my complaints, let me be totally fair to today’s youth: we adults, now grandparents, did idiotic things too when young.
We think that if we could have our lives over again, we would say, and in shame, “I would never do the stupid things I did.”
Acknowledging this, our main concern now must be to protect our grandchildren, and put moral content into their lives.
My own set of Commandments comes from a poem, with the last two lines being: “
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