Don't Waste Your Youth

Our bedroom window nearest my side of the bed faces the street.  It is not a constantly busy street, but in my opinion the problem is not the cars or even the heavy lorries roaring to and from the building sites where they are constructing new houses in the grassy area where a primary school was demolished some years ago.  Pity about the building project, but that's another gripe entirely.

Up here on the top of the hill would have been a good view over the town westwards. From one window we  can see only the roofs of houses, blocks of flats, shops, city buildings.  Beyond them, though, miles away, softened by distance, a row of low hills gives a certain charm and interest to the skyline. It would be somewhere to sit of an evening, out on the balcony, if there was one, watching the sun sink slowly behind the hills, bringing closure to the day.  Instead, from across the street, where the shops are - two convenience stores, two take-aways, all cheek-by-jowl  -  the boys, the local youths, young men unemployed, with evidently nothing better to do than stand with their backs to the wall, talking loudly, often obscenely, sometimes in argument that ends in fighting, more often in raucous conversation and rowdy laughter, to the accompaniment of a deal of good-natured pushing and shoving.

One wonders if this is all life has to offer them, and if so, where is this country heading?  The lads are well-dressed, not flashy but not shoddy.  Many, probably most, of them smoke.  From the shrill, affected laughter, of some of them it would seem that drugs of one sort or another have common currency.  What does life hold for them?  To what kind of future can they look forward?  There must be opportunities - why do they lack the incentive to make use of them?  Is life too easy for them, or too hard?  Is the Government aware of the situation?  If so, are they doing anything about it?

So I lie on my bed and read.  But the window by my bed faces the street.  So I wear ear plugs and ear-protectors.  And I think of the farm, and the space and the silence of the bushveld in Rhodesia where I had the privilege, the incalculable privilege, of spending my boyhood, youth and early manhood.  Of spending my formative years in the pre-electronic age, when life was local and we found ample enjoyment and fulfillment nonetheless.

Is the condition of these lads one of their choosing?  Jobs, any kind of jobs, we are told, are not easy to find at present.  But the situation was the same before the job market got tough.  Are they really trying to find jobs, something, anything, rather than lounge around in the streets?  I put the question to a twenty-four-year-old who I happen to know hates the job he has been in for the last nine months or so.  "They seem happy enough," he said.  "Someone is paying for them.  Why should they work?"


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