My friend will buy a gun at 35 if
he does not get employment or have capital to start an enterprise. I told him that
my case will be different. At that age, I will count my losses and get the best
Synethesia which I will overdose and sleep sweet. He warned me of throwing
myself in a well or going for drugs as two of our friends recently did after
campus and now are in graves. We are both 25.
We may agree that we have been
caught up in what is described as a quarter life crisis. Or refuse. Our hopes
and expectations are doubtful. There are no (few) people who can offer
assistance. The best place to be is among your peers and the best time is to laugh
and have drinks- get high. Relationships are daily abused and the best feeling
and thought is to get out of your job/school/home and go away. Away!
Life as a youth is full of uncertainties
though the society kinda has already regulated what you can do and not do
during the period. There are schools to make you immobile, confined and occupied
against your late adolescent. And there are a number of proverbs warning youths
to respect the elderly, obey the present laws and other things with a ready punishment
for going astray.
I did a poem a few days ago about
the joy of a youth. (
here)
A new report commissioned by the
East African Institute (EAI), the Kenya Youth Survey Report, revealed that 50
per cent of youth in Kenya do not care what means one uses to make money as
long as they do not end up in jail. I agree with the report. Why should I be
found in traffic when there is a motorcycle? Why should I queue when there is
an agent who can take tea?
Seemingly there is a shock of a
misinformed past that education is the way to a brighter future. They should
have said that as a mental breakthrough and not physical need providence. Most
of our parents, caught up in generational poverty strived to send us to school
not really to make our lives better but to put us in the battle field. To give
me a job, anyway is like what my friend termed a wheelchair offer. It won’t
compensate the pain, hunger, canes, early wakes and all the school struggle.
It is good to have knowledge and
skills but when systems frankly compromise by absence of opportunities or
resources, a weakling as a youth won’t fail to compensate by compromising
through feudal means like crime. Who made law anyway? Virtue is the result of
abundance. If corruption got my friend a job at a certain company, why should I
not get a job too? You are always a straight man before a dilemma comes along.
You will get clean once, not always.
I won’t defend the youths to
death anyway because they have their shortcomings like impatience. My view
would be to understand the pressures of their time and give them support
understanding that they are inventors of no vices but products of them through
mangled institutions of families, schools and jobs.
Are you a challenged youth? Take
heart.
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