So normally this is an entertainment piece, but grave recent events didn’t have me thinking I should be writing a comedic piece this week. Our reality isn’t comedic.  

Make it stop

The life of a 22-year-old UTech student was snatched away two nights ago in a robbery gone wrong. Just a few weeks ago 18 babies died in hospital from some mystery bacteria, and our main health representative decided the deceased weren’t “babies in the real sense of the word”. I’m going on this painful trip down memory lane because after all this, I can’t help but feel undervalued as a youth in this country. I’m asking that this attitude that the youth aren’t the present AND the future, be stopped. We really are a precious commodity, and if from infancy to young adulthood we are not protected and valued by our own people here at home, then where else can we go? What can we do? Going to school and feeling like an endangered species in my own country is not a good look.

So this blindness to the worth and significance to this country as young people, is what I (and all of us I’m sure) would like to stop.

Gotta have it – Respect as a young person in this country.

I want to walk out on the streets and feel protected by the adults around, rather than threatened. When in uniform (or otherwise) on the way to school, we gotta have some sense that we aren’t an annoyance to fellow adult citizens or a nuisance. Keep the negative comments about ‘this generation, and how much better life was’ in your days to yourself.

We already live in a country riddled with crime and a lopsided economy, so some encouragement to thrive under these current circumstances is what would benefit us instead. Got to have some reassurance from someone, somewhere among our political leaders, that the life of every baby, child, teen and young adult, matters.