by Alissa King

Created on: October 21, 2007

Every generation seems to see the downfalls and shortcomings of the one that follows after. My parents were sure that all the teens in my generation were going to hell in a hand-basket because we were lazy and obscene. In point of fact, some of us were lazy and obscene, but that has been a steady fraction of the teenage demographic since the first Neanderthal man figured out how to grunt a vocal epithet. If someone were to ask me now, as a seasoned grown-up, if today's youth are lacking in compassion, my estimation would be that some are and some aren't. Teenagers haven't changed that much as a group over the years.

Human nature doesn't really change when you get right down to it. Our population is bigger now than it used to be, so there are probably more people who exist that lack compassion, but they are balanced out by more people who have compassion in spades. Individuals haven't started changing on a generational basis, but let's approach this as a cultural question. It might be worded this way: Is modern culture breeding youth who do not care for their fellow man?

That's an interesting one, and I would still say "No", vehemently. I've seen my daughter cry over injustice in cartoons; I've watched her friends grow upset over the plight of homeless kittens. These are kids who can feel and feel deeply. However-
...and there is a however, because cultural differences do exist in the modern world, and they have an impact, particularly upon what we feel strongly toward, and how we deal with it. I think it would be easy to get the idea that kids are disconnected if you were to watch a modern day teenager go through a normal weekday. School, homework, video games, and then a bout with the cell-phone or a few hours with the television. Youth today are plugged into technology in a way that their parents couldn't possibly have been.

Meaning that while despair and anxiety for the world's ills still exist in the hearts of today's youth, they have some easy escape routes that weren't available to kids generations ago. They can go into electronic worlds and relieve the focus from anxiety inducing issues like widespread HIV in Africa, crime in big cities, and injustice right down the street. Is this healthy? Not necessarily, but neither is our culture with its 24 hour panic inducing media, and such an overwhelming mass of information and images coming into the household through a screen every day. You can't expect teens to unplug from their escape routes unless the culture as a whole first unplugs from the need to know every awful thing that's happening every hour of the day.

And were we really so different, the youth of yesteryear? Perhaps not. I spent much of the acne age hidden in the pages of Bronte, Poe and Tolkien. Others like me had television and more primitive computer games. We escaped from a world we found difficult to relate to, and did so in the fashions that were available to us at the time, much like the youth of today.

So no, I am not of the belief that today's youth are lacking in compassion. They feel the same way as other people feel, they simply have their own modern ways of dealing with it.

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