Ruthie wrote
this over in Minnesota:
She's eighteen. She has a slim little body, dark, wavy hair and brown eyes that positively glow with smug self-awareness and nascent sexuality. She drinks too much. She wants to be a model. She's slept with several of her co-workers.
She alternates dizzily between childish giddiness and a sort of stoic, pursed-lips silence (her interpretation of the model "pout" she sees on TV). She doesn't yet know if she wants to be outgoing and fun or aloof and superior.
If you ask her what she likes to do, she'll say "shop," or "drink." If you ask her what she wants to study, she'll look at you blankly. Then she'll giggle. "Fashion design!" she'll say. "If I don't make it as a model first."
K is really a very ugly girl. She's rude and self-absorbed, she drinks while she works, and she turns on a horrible false friendliness for customers that makes my teeth hurt. She comes to work hungover and complains bitterly about the unfairness of her life (even after her father bought her a brand-new car), the cold outside, and her customers— just before switching on a painted-on smile as she walks out the kitchen door.
... which was, interestingly, almost a carbon copy of a conversation we were having over here in Russia. Now is that coincidence or what? Our context was different but the issues are identical.
A young Muslim lady who visits me was talking about her youngish [25] sister who incidentally, also visits me and did so later yesterday. The issue was the dumbing down of education and the surgical extraction of any sort of moral code. Interesting that a Muslim and a Christian could discuss this together.
There is a generation now in whom many of the elements of previous generations are all still there - making the same errors, thinking and doing the same things, kicking against authority and so on but with some added elements - really gross ignorance, vacuousness if you like.
The education system has begun to break down here as it has in the west and whereas before even the street sweeper could quote you Pushkin, today they seriously know nothing. I quantified that with general knowledge tests. Now for me to make such a statement detracts from it because of my own age but when Ruthie wrote what she did above and when my 35 year old friend also said it, then I felt it might have something to it.
There's one key indicator over here - a girl's tummy. No girl - and I really mean that - ten years back would have been seen dead on the street with a flabby tummy. Now, with fifteen year olds, it's common to see flab hanging over the ripped hipster jeans and packaged in with it all are multiple piercing, tattoos everywhere, cheap costume jewellery and a vacuous, defiant expression. Many are pregnant.
Out of all this, I extract three points - the vacuously gross ignorance, the soul bereft of any moral framework or goal in life and the sordid lifestyle. You only have to get into the lifestyle of the blogger I left Blogpower over and it's dire and bestial, that world [which he stays above at blog level].
The language is coarse, the concerns are limited to external things of no real consequence, even to them in the long run, they're so easily bored and there is not a parent to be seen - no family context. They are resisting any kind of education and educating themselves in their own neo-bestiality, fuelled by advertising, dance lyrics and dark computer games.
Against that are the girls and guys at university. When I made a comment actually praising young people - most of these uni folk are go-getters, speaking four languages and with goals for the future, one group stopped me, said I was wrong and began a tirade about young people generally today, saying largely what is written above. That's why Ruthie's post meant so much. These girls are a bit younger than Ruthie - 20 and yet they were saying roughly the same thing and it has to make a person feel encouraged.
Over here there is a well known reaction to any disaster - кто виноват и что делять? Who is to blame and what to do? So who is to blame for the children's current sorry state?
Well look at it logically. The children for a start who are resisting education and continuously opting for the soft variant. So who allows it? Parents who throw up their hands and ask what they can do - it's just society. Schools which are not teaching properly. Example - I know a teacher who is so ignorant of any general world knowledge and yet she can quote every feminist author on how oppressed women are.
Now in the case of the schools, which are hierarchical in nature, the heads of departments must bear the blame but they themselves are so brainwashed in the new ignorance that they allow this guff to go on. I know this is so because my second cousin dragged me round to a few of these things when he was 19 and they really were dire.
Nothing wrong with a bit of mindless drinking but this was sex in church grounds, urinating anywhere and no concept of certain decencies. I'm desperately trying to steer clear of prudishness here and just say there are some things the people I know, who can be pretty wild, would still draw the line at. Some of you know the song: "I knew she was a lady 'cause she moved the dishes first."
So no, I don't mean a bit of excess in your own sphere but a sort of cultural ignorance, an ignorance of what people have achieved before you. It really is the ignorance which gets to me. How did these people get so ignorant in the first place?
My Muslim woman friend had her own view yesterday. She said it was no accident, that it was very much an organized thing, all of it - from the dumbing down through to the drugs, porn and so on. Regulars know that's one of my themes but I was shocked to hear it come from a person so divergent from my background.
I then asked her who then was behind it, who was this organization? She said, "Money. Just that, money." Asked to explain, she said that with no moral framework in the kids' heads, they are swayed this way and that and fall for anything bright and interesting, like babies do. Her own 12 year old is into Russian computer games and she said she looked at some of the crass names of characters and blanched.
I never asked her why she allowed these games but if I had, she might have answered that if he didn't play them at home he'd play them at a friend's. True but what if all parents acted in the same way and restricted things just a bit, added the concept to the children's minds of delayed gratification and having to work for what you get? What if the children were given a moral framework which society had largely agreed on? We used to have one.
I don't mean high church or sharia law but something emanating from parents, educators, everyone? Doesn't anyone see that these mindless kids are groping around in the dark, looking for meaning in life and finding readily available pap in its place and in the palaces of glitz where they spend their days? I asked the 25 year old sister where she was going after me. She said to the Riviera.
This is a shopping complex and I asked her why there and not at, say, Koltso? She said that this one looked out over the river and you had nature while you shopped whereas the other was just a shopping orgy. So nature does intrude into the mindset after all. She's only a little afflicted with the disease then.
I just think the whole thing is so sad out there now.
And anyone, anyone at all, who tries to pull the plug on this inexorable, zombie-like procession towards the low-life is turned on, marginalized and vilified. This process has its fail safes as well.
So I ask my lady friend who's behind the money and that's where her Muslimness and my Christianity diverge. Because in our faith, there is very much an answer, a quite simple answer to that question I asked her.
We can blog about the political machine, we can blog about the new feudalism, we can blog about the follies of pollies but this blogger thinks we have a greater danger to confront - the rise of the yahoo.
