The Unbreakable Leo

What do you do on your weekend off? After a long tiring and exhausting week of work do sleep in on Saturday and Sunday? Do you just lounge around the house and watch television all day? Maybe you're one of those people who just powers up the Playstation to immerse yourself in hours of Halo or Metal Gear Solid. Why not take some time in those 48 free hours and give them to someone who needs your help, your guidance or inspiration? All around the world countries and communities are dealing with tight budgets from the downward spiral of their respective economies. In an effort to save money many city councils around America and the United Kingdom are slashing budgets and programs in order to stay afloat. The average person is often unaware of these things because these budget cuts don't effect them in anyway, but take a closer look at the programs and services being cut and you'll see a trend that could have dire consequences for our collective future.

One night while watching television I happened to see a program on BBC which centered around this very subject. All across the United Kingdom programs are being cut in order to close budget gaps for many cities. In places like Fife and Glasgow community centers and school programs are first items on the chopping block since many of these programs generate little to no funds. Public swimming pools are closing, after school programs like music are ending and personnel for senior housing are working twice as much with little to no compensation. The only thing saving the after school programs is a small stream of volunteers from local community members who've seen the benefits of these programs no matter how small or insignificant they may seem. One community center in England is still open only because community members have stepped up to fill the void due to staff reduction. Seeing how the center affects the balance of their community more volunteers jumped on board as not to overwhelm the first few volunteers. These few people took matters in their own hands and slowed down, if not stopped the closing of their community center.

But what if this center would have closed due to budget cuts from the local City Council? One woman interviewed by BBC News talked about the roaming drunken teenagers who have nothing else to do and who lack a creative outlet for their energy. It has made her small city unsafe and made her think twice about taking her small children for a walk or even to their theater class at the local community center, which has just enough money to service elementary age children but not older youth. She made an excellent point of how these children were the product of other closed centers that would have catered to their interest. This isn't to say that if programs aren't available then kids will always turn to the extreme vices of life, but there does need to be activities for young people to express themselves and be an outlet for their often misunderstood creative side. Now it seems that communities like these risk loosing their youth to the sterilized truth and the consequence of that can have repercussion for an entire generation.

In the United States we have similar issues that needs to be reevaluated by the community at large. Speaking from my own experience working with youth there is an extreme lack of individuals wanting to give their time and pass on their knowledge to young people who are looking for guidance. Today it seems that the young are lost, but not in the sense that they're roaming the streets at night although there are many doing this. So many young people in high school have no idea about their futures, how to obtain money for college, have no role models and have no idea how to become a leader in their community. Leaders are not born but they are shaped by the people close to them and their surroundings. If we aren't fostering a sense of leadership in the youth then we are neglecting them and dooming these same youngsters to a future of being followers and mindless cogs in the machine of society. I often make parallels to issues in the UK and here, as it seems that without role models in their 20's and 30's the youth often seem apathetic to anything in life that requires effort. A long time ago I was one of these youth and so many of my friends and I were inspire by volunteers who gave us their time to teach us about life.

Just as Langston Hughes states many youth are sacrificed for the truth. Take into account No Child Left Behind, where most of us see it as a ploy by special interests to take money away from "failing" schools to reroute those same funds to other schools the establishment favors. More often than not these "failing" school are located in lower income neighborhoods with a high minority population. After school programs are cut and teachers are loosing their jobs at alarming rates, but what most people don't know is that No Child Left Behind gives the military unlimited access to schools and student records. Most of these kids don't have community centers where volunteers can inspire them to take the scholastic high road. Instead the Army, Marines and Navy set up ROTC programs in schools and have information booths at college fairs to recruit our young people for an ever-expanding imperial global military. So it does seem that the youth are being killed off for the sake of truth, but it depends on which truth they are being killed off or sacrificed for.

Langston Hughes must have being able to see into the future as spoke about the youth of his time and ours in his poem which seems very reminiscent of George Orwell's prediction of the future in his book 1984. A war-makers' bait for unwise youth or the collapse in the structure of community preservation, you make the call. In America today most of us tend to be very selfish with our time and rightfully so as our time is spent as slaves to another persons schedule. But why not take two hours a week or a few hours a month and build on the future of your respective community? It sounds like such a daunting task to save the world, but think of it as participating in the tradition of "paying it forward" for the next generation. Somewhere along the line our generation become too busy with our gadgets and television programs, we forgot that we were raised in the village mentality as people other then our parents scolded us if we did wrong. For the sake of not sounding like an ABC After School special, our youth really need help to make it in this world and without your help what are they do to? As the saying goes, "hindsight is always 20/20," so think of the future of the youth as they are being sacrificed for another man's truth. Help them see the bundle of lies and the ways that it's been tied together and sterilized.