By Onwuasoanya FCC Jones, an opinion and issues contributor to USAfricaonline.com, first African-owned, US-based professional newspaper published on the Internet and USAfrica magazine, Houston.
If we want to know how the world will look like in the next two decades, we should look at how young families are nurtured and how today’s parents raise their children. Children who are trained to think that life is a happy-go-lucky adventure, are bound to encounter a lot of accidents on the way which they wouldn’t be able handle, because their heads and emotions were not prepared for such. They were misled by their parents and guardians into fantasizing about life, hence, when they literally live on a plane of imagination and have very low threshold for pain and disappointments. Their brains are also not trained to process information beyond what they are told or what seems true, hence, their vulnerability to dangerous conspiracy theories and false preachings.
The world is not going crazy, the world has gone crazy! From America to China, to everywhere else you know, there are reports of violence, unusual inclinations and many weird incidents, especially, affecting young people. Not necessarily, Gen Z or X, but they are unarguably, in the largest number.
I do not have the statistics, and for the purpose of this write-up, I am not going to embark on any special investigations, but I can guess that men and women in their fifties or above can hardly be found involved in some of the most alarming acts of violence, queer orientations and or falling victims to some ludicrous conspiracy theories that have gripped the world of politics and religion.
In America and most Western nations, mass shootings have almost become daily occurrences. People wake up in the morning, pick up their automatic rifles and go on a shooting spree, many times, just because they feel that’s the easiest way to grab the headlines and at other times, maybe, because someone treated them badly in the past, or they are simply having some bad times and decide to take it out on innocent people.
While the obsession of religion might be as old as mankind, I doubt if there had been anytime in the past when so many people willingly fall victim to brazen fraud, painted up as religion. In the past, there were false prophets, but I think they cover up a lot, that it would have required very perceptive people to unravel them, but this time around, the fraudsters parading as Men of God and miracle workers leave a lot of traces, but it is either the present generation is too mentally lazy to see these things or our world has become more accustomed to dishonest living as a normality.
In politics, the world is on an apocalyptic bend with current trends of our politics. Many countries are ditching sensible candidates who drive their campaigns on realistic manifestos to embrace bubbleheaded demagogues who tell them what they want to hear and concoct all manner of conspiracy theories to sway the people’s support. From Poland to Argentina and America, the world seems to be heading to the extreme right of the polity, and extreme right simply means; intolerance and hardly progressive ideals. People are easily won over by extreme right candidates because they almost always do not say the truth. These extreme right politicians are mostly manipulators who take advantage of the mass gullibility of the people to ride into political prominence and power. Of course, most of them end up not achieving 30% of the promises that earned them the people’s support, thereby, leaving the people stranded and frustrated.
Marriages are crashing at a frightening rate because many people in our generation do not have the right discipline to stay in marriage. It is either the man believes that he should always have his way or the woman feels she deserves more freedom from her man. Many of our parents made the mistake of thinking that their own parents were too tough on them and ended up raising a generation of academically brilliant and technologically savvy, but emotionally and mentally weak people.
If psychiatrists could dedicate some time to finding out the connection between mental health and the safety of our world, they might be able to understand where the crisis ravaging the world is coming from.
I listened to a radio programme sometime where the presenter said something like; “We should concentrate on teaching our children resilience rather than easiness” and I do not think there could be a better way to put it. Many of the crises we have in the world today are as a result of having mentally soft and emotionally weak people, who were over-pampered by their parents.
