By Steve Charles
“Youth is the future, and I believe we should involve young people in solving problems facing the state and society. The adults are not always able to find a right solution, because they lack ambition, desire, and passion, which are attributes of youth….” Quoted from the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe publication titled Youth of the 21st Century, Realities and Perspectives.
Youth! Whenever we hear the word “youth” we bubble with joy, remembering days of youth – the days of such great aspirations, great and noble ambitions stewing in the pots of our lives. Those days of youth are responsible for our present life situations; for it was the unforgetably fertile soil of youthfulness that we sowed in, plowed and reaped today’s fruits of prosperity and worthwhile achievements.
Youthfulness, undoubtly, is certainly a period of life which must be decidedly carefully selectively planned for. If the enriching resource of youthful years is not carefully managed, we most probably stand to sustain enormous loss from the coffer of our years. This is applicable at the personal as well as the national level. A nation, like a person, which does not carefully manage and invest into its youth will reap a harvest of incompetently underproductive adults. It will reap the fruits of malnourished production from its future adult population.
St. Lucian youths today live in a world of globalization and modernization. It is an era that St. Lucia has never before experienced. It is the age of advanced technologies – digital technology and more sophistication. It is not yesteryear’s simplicity, gone are those years. It’s the age of “preparation” to utilize fully all the potentials and opportunities of the age that lives alongside us. Our St. Lucian youths must be thoroughly competently empowered to cope in this age of globalization and modernization – to cope with life on this increasingly digital planet, to use modern technological phraseology.
How will we achieve this almost seemingly alien task? Who will take the lead in approaching this mammoth task? Will government be the first initiator? Will parents be the first initiators? Or will youths, sensing their critical situation, first initiate?
The United Nation’s Economic Commission for Europe Report titled Youth of the 21st Century, Realities and Perspectives,” has a lot of good advice for St. Lucia despite the fact that the situations examined therein were not particularly St. Lucia’s. Nonetheless, the principles characteristic of those broader situations involving youth, share commonality with that of St. Lucia’s. The UNECE First Regional Forum on Youth: “Security, Opportunity and Prosperity,” held in Geneva, made a number of recommendations aiming to mobilize public action to alleviate distress and problems faced by young people. St. Lucia can learn and benefit from its recommendations. According to the UN’s Forum on Youth: “…Since recently the attention to youth everywhere has been growing. This is not surprising. There is an OBVIOUS GLOBAL trend – the problems facing youth have been on the rise… The United Nations’ response was the establishment of a group of imminent public figures and outstanding leaders of industry who were asked to make recommendations on what could and should be done to reverse this trend….”
As regards St. Lucia’s current youth-problems, we are all to well aware of the enormousness of our task to bring alleviation and urgent relief to the situation. St. Lucian youths are today buffeted on all sides by tornadoes of social, economic, moral and cultural plagues. The same problems afflicting youths around the globe are afflicting St. Lucian youths.
The UN’s “Forum on Youth” identified a number of such problems causing adversity and distress to youth in Europe. Those problems include: (1) Increased teenaged births-- St. Lucia recorded 436 teenaged births for 2003 and 437 for 2004 respectively. (2) High youth unemployment rates – St. Lucia’s youth unemployment rate was 47.7% for persons 15 to 19 years and 27.7% for persons 20 to 24 years old in June 2006. (3) Declining school enrolment rate – St. Lucia’s enrolment for secondary level was 74 % for the year 2005/06 (4) High school dropout rate – St. Lucia’s secondary dropout rate was 162 students for 2004/05 and 112 students for 2005/06. (6)Youth socialization – St. Lucia suffers chronically from poorly and under socialized youth as is evident by the number of female headed households, from which many of our young convicted criminals originate.
The UN’s Youth Forum States: “… Among the major factors responsible for the distress of youth were institutional and organizational changes in the area of youth socialization, coupled with a steep decline of public expenditure on health and education, and economic hardship experienced by most of the families [of problem-youth].
“The stress of rapid change and economic hardship of families…have weakened their capacity to raise their young….As a result many young people have been growing without a proper family, or, worse, in the streets,… an outcome of such situation has been an increase in juvenile crime, substance abuse, youth and child prostitution, and other forms of social deviance.
“… Of the most serious consequences of the above trends has been an increase in the youth vulnerability to all the potential risk factors, including the threat of HIV/AIDs. Almost 80% of new cases of HIV infection between 1989 and 2000 in Commonwealth of Independent States countries were among young people 15-29 years of age….”
Whist the situation in St. Lucia has not reached that degree of fatal direction, there is no reason to believe that St. Lucia youths should be considered immune to such trend.
The Forum on Youth: Security, Opportunity and Prosperity concludes: “…In the absence of systematic and vigorous preventive measures against these diseases, the threat of widespread epidemic with heavy losses in human life and devastating economic consequences is very real.”
According to the UN’s report youths worldwide are of great preciousness to human society. However, youths are in solemn distress, very urgently remedial measures ought to be applicably steered to their rescue. Among the devastating scourges demolishing youth globally are: poverty, crime, hunger, drugs disease, unemployment, inadequate education and skills and many more…
Consider these global trends as regards the situation of youth: (a) Violence—“young people are offenders and victims. They kill and are killed, more than any other group;
2 million deaths and 5 million wounded.; (b) diseases—HIV/AIDS, almost 12 million young men and women live with HIV/AIDS; 6,000 young people get infected every day;
2.5 million cases in 2002, up from 58 million in 1995; (c) hunger—malnutrition affects 38 million to 110 million youths; (d) poverty—238 million live on one (US) dollar a day; 462 million live on two (US) dollars a day; (e) unemployed youth constitute 41 percent of the unemployed worldwide; (e) education—133 million youths globally are illiterate.
Let us be reminded of the value of youth Let us be reminded of the great pleasure their physicality contributes to the merriment of our days. I consulted my comrade Mr. Concentric, who’s consolidating a conception of youth, right in the center of the circumference of my mind. He reminiscently strolls along a radius of my mind imposing the importance of youth’s value and beauty to me:
“A young woman walks down the street, her hair danglingly dances, expressing a melodic beauty within her being. Her physical being is so beautiful, it pours visions of heavenly bliss yet to be enjoyed, but now enjoyed by the sight of her physical, so beautiful. All men are attracted to her beauty; I am attracted to her beauty. “From whence has it come?” I ask myself silently, but shoutingly to the universe. “And why am I attracted to her beauty?” my being questions. Then, a potent voice from beneath my feet answers both my questions. “Her beauty is God-created beauty, her beauty is God’s attribute of beauty; his divinity has unsurpassed beauty. His Divinity has unsurpassable creativity of beauty; from God comes her beauty. Why are you attracted to her beauty? Well, being a God-created creature, his beauty stings the strings of your soul’s beauty, and you respond harmoniously and attractively to her beauty. God’s beauty in you both sing a chorus together.” I am enlightened, by a potent voice enlightened; as I look around me, more of women’s beauty I see, and I remain not baffled, for God’s signature speaks in each of his creatures; for God’s signature sings in each of his creatures. My questioning soul rejoices. It reverberates with rejoicing, for God has softly touched it with his voice of wisdom. And I, too, have tasted wisdom, for God’s wisdom in her physical beauty has my soul visited to give beauty’s wisdom, created by God’s infinite wisdom.”
We must take heed that the world has its own share of youth problems to solve. That St. Lucians must act concertedly and urgently to avert greater disaster than we now experience. We must seek to protect and progress our youth into the 21st Century and give them security, opportunity and prosperity.