Be any colour you like... - 17 Jun 2008

This is another prime opportunity to whinge about rising inflation, but, by the look of things, it's not going anywhere but up, so let's leave it to another week. The country, however, celebrated a very special day yesterday - no, not just a public holiday, it was Youth Day. Ah, teenagers... Tunnel vision trained on the face of a small LCD screen, cap askew on some diagonal, t-shirt not quite long enough to cover the expanse of undies poking out of jeans that are hanging round the knees. Can you believe that there's a whole new tech-savvy generation out there that doesn't know life without cellphones and the internet? And parents, it's almost guaranteed your kid knows more about your phone and pokey dial-up connection than you do. And whether it's MXit, MySpace, Facebook, calls from mom, they're always communicating with someone. It seems just yesterday that the only possibility of having a foreign penpal is if a mate emigrated or your neighbour, who asked you to bring in the mail and feed their dog while they're away in the Seychelles, sends a postcard addressed to themselves saying 'Wish you were here.' But now, in the day where you've got more access to information than TV channels and more overseas friends on Facebook than you do classmates, why is there still a surprising number of these whiz-kids who are battling to communicate with each other at school; and when they do, it's with marked antipathy? Violence in schools is on the increase (or is this just a renewed focus for media?) and, (are we back in the 70's here folks?) there are many schools across the country still waiting on textbooks from Government. Not to mention groups of our so-called 'born frees' (children born post-1994) who have as much tolerance for each other as a math teacher facing a room full of moody teens who haven't done their homework because they "don't understand". And perhaps this is the problem. Though we have at our fingertips tools of communication we could only dream of 15 years ago, there is still a lack of understanding across cultures. So it's to these kids I say: don't look on your classmates as foreign because they speak another language. Consider this a chance to learn something new: a different language, another culture, a new outlook on life. Where as your parents weren't 'allowed to', there's nothing stopping you from stepping into this new world. We are, as they say, the Rainbow Nation, and you can be any colour you like.