Rwandan youth 15 years after Liberation

When I was growing up, I was very aware of the struggles my parents had undergone. Indeed ‘struggle’ is a serious understatement. From a tender age, they found themselves forced into exile and having to start from zero again. That they eventually triumphed over the odds life had so gleefully stacked infront of them is astounding. For many of us, our parents’ lives had a sort of Dickensian arc- born into difficult times, thrust unceremoniously into even more difficult times and then working their way up to success. Those of us from the younger generation have subsequently grown up with a high degree of smooth progression through life. We were-to quote Jacques Roger Booh-Booh’s lamentable autobiography-‘born under a lucky star.’ We grew up in relative comfort, shielded from the harsh realities connected to our heritage. All the horrors were second-hand to us because we obviously never experienced them. Today, this generation is poised to inherit the world from our ancestors. We have coasted through life thanks to our parents’ struggles and we have ‘never had it so good’ as former British Prime Minister Harold MacMillan famously said. We are not going to have any genuine hardship stories to transmit to our children. Our parents and grandparents had to deal with things like exile, poverty and alienation. For us, our idea of struggle is slow internet connections or a failure to get our hands on a DVD of a particularly popular TV Show. So now that we are coming to a passing-of-the-torch moment, I find myself wondering: what is our generation really going to be like? Our parents’ ethical and cultural were formed in very testing times. They also had a sense of solidarity and that was crucial for those times and a drive to succeed that was overwhelming. How much of that has our generation inherited? I found myself musing on this while interacting with something that symbolises the generational class: Facebook. As the social networking site so beloved of the youth, it seems to me that it provides a good indicator about where our generation is going. A few minutes on Facebook doesn’t provide many positive things to dwell on. We are the generation that is determined to share every single aspect of our lives, no matter how banal. Facebook and other social networking sites tend to make people more self-absorbed. Much of the social networking is artificial as well-swapping pictures and adding even the faintest acquaintances turning it into some kind of competitive sport. There is a sort of hollow emptiness about many aspects of Facebook. This isn’t to suggest that Facebook is evidently a bad thing (and I know it sounds like I’m sitting on the fence in a manner that would make politicians jealous) but it does suggest that our generation will flirt with self-absorption a lot more forcefully than our ancestors. We might become less grounded and cast adrift of our culture and we might lack the steel and resolve that carried them through. In many ways, Facebook shows the perils of the modern world: an attention-deficit mindset, bogged down by all the tiny mundane details of everybody’s social life. Facebook has many useful functions and its form of networking can be crucial, but you do wonder about a generation which has it as a sort of cultural and moral touchstone. Of course fears for the ‘Facebook generation’ (for lack of a better term) are common. A recent American study suggested that many young adults in the country have grown up in the kind of environment that had turned them into acute narcissists. As the children of the post-war generation, they have grown up with a strong sense of entitlement and arrogance. Meanwhile in China, there are worries about the ‘little emperor’ syndrome arising from the one-child policy. To varying degrees, the older generation in those countries have also had to go through their own struggles in their respective political and cultural settings. However they too may be wondering about the direction of the new digital generation and the legacy they will leave for their own descendants in the future. Obviously this isn’t to suggest that the majority of this generation are self-absorbed, but rather to wonder whether this tendency is a lot stronger than it was with previous generations. Perhaps the worries about the digital generation are moral decline are overblown. The current pace of change and the revolutions that have come with it are unprecedented, but there is no reason why our generation cannot adapt while holding onto the values of our parents. After all, that is what mankind has been doing since the dawn of civilization. It is inevitable that there will often be changes between generations, but it is how we respond to them that will define us. minega_isibo@yahoo.co.uk