A few weeks ago, I watched a limited series on Netflix entitled “Adolescence”. It was an excellent show that dealt with a thirteen-year-old boy murdering a girl from his school. The program dealt with the complex issues that confronted both the boy and his typical, in this case, English family. Basically, it showed things can happen, truly horrible things, without anyone really realizing what is hidden beneath the surface. There is nothing causal other than normal stress and confusion of adolescence that created the situation. The family, consisting of a dad, mom, son and daughter, did nothing of significance that traumatized the son to make him a murderer.
While I was watching the 4 episodes, I kept thinking about the current societal environment that we are placing our children and grandchildren in and if they can survive some of the worse influencers our country has possibly ever had to emulate acceptable behavior. Through various avenues of social media, we even have individuals that make tens of thousands and even millions of dollars being nothing more than influencers. They simply influence how individuals, particularly but not exclusively teenagers, should act, look, wear and live their lives. Many of these individuals are not people that any parent would really want to influence their teenager.
I remember a time when most parents would have liked to have their sons and daughters emulate the moral character and personality qualities of the President of the United States. They were largely men, regrettable we have not had any female presidents, of high moral character, wisdom, compassion, integrity, courage, empathy, and intelligence. Not every president possessed every positive personal attribute listed but they did have many of them.
Unfortunately, many of our current congressional members and the current president possess few of these essential attributes for being a good leader. Many of our current members of Congress are cowardly, have little integrity, are selfish, liars, manipulative, greedy and do little to reflect the interests of their constituents while doing their job in Congress.
The current president is one of the more horrible human beings to ever grace the oval office. He is a man of little integrity because he endlessly lies and always is playing out some type of con job on the public. He exhibits no compassion for anyone and has no ability to be empathetic toward anyone regardless of the situation. He is a spiteful, vengeful man with an extremely thin skin who holds grudges forever. For example: he has threatened to withhold federal funding for Maine colleges unless the state’s governor personally apologizes to him. He is a transactional person where there must be some benefit, usually monetary, for his actions as president.
Several presidents were power driven, as is the current president, but very few saw the office as a way to expand their wealth while being the president. Several presidents became much wealthier after being president, not while being the president, usually from book deals and public speaking appearances.
What type of society is evolving that influences and molds future generations? Each generation has environmental and societal factors they must traverse that shape what they will become as citizens of this once great country. Our politics has become about who can be a more effective liar and how much money can be spent degrading your political opponent. We cannot have elections where a few billionaires throw millions into select elections to purchase beholden politicians that will do their bidding and not represent the interests of the people who voted for them.
Our economy is not really a free-market economy, but an economy built on monopolistic behavior and the acceptance of as little responsibility for the quality of the product or service as possible. Business wants substantial deregulation so they can once again pollute as much as possible, exploit labor as much as possible and generally experience unbridled capitalism that will grow our already sizeable income inequality.
So, the youth of today are seeing a truly messed up society where constant lying is perfectly acceptable. Becoming extremely wealthy by whatever means is the only solution to living a successful life. We continue to be the only developed nation on the planet without some form of nationalized health care and we now are in the process of possibly taking affordable health care away from millions. We have the most well-financed military on the planet that operates fiscally unaccountable and wastes billions. Many of our political leaders are reprehensible human beings of little character that have been fully corrupted by the money in politics.
While it may have been true that each successive generation must deal with failings and shortcomings of previous generations. The youth today are being left with a complicated mess no previous generation has ever had to deal with from massive, accumulated debt to irresponsible fiscal management of the nation’s resources and wealth to dealing with an unregulated social media frequently used to deceiving and manipulating individuals into making decisions that often are against their own self interests.
