“Young people have no respect” you might’ve heard that phrase at least once in your lifetime. The young are often blamed for many of today’s issues, now although they have contributed other factors have also played their part in the increase of the problems in today’s world….let me explain.
The media is one factor contributing to our predicament. In news reports they tend to emphasise the negatives rather than the positives, taking an event and reporting it such a way that makes our minds think a certain way, I’ll give you an example on the day that the news broke about the Woolwich murders and the journalist mentioned the video of the terrorist there was a genuine part of me that assumed he was Asian, then after seeing the video and realising he was black and British born I felt like logic had been defied my perception had been changed that’s when I realised what the media do to people. They report things in such a way that it builds this bizarre stereotypical image in our minds of “this is a terrorist he looks like this” and in turn leads to stereotyping and generalising people based on what we see in the news
Another contributing factor is society in general, yes it’s destroying itself. Despite the fact that people say society has changed since the 20th century the underlying problem stays there, in our society humanity never like what they don’t understand and they don’t like change, from the end of the slave trade to the civil rights movement, from 9/11 to the Woolwich crisis, change is the natural order of things without change we can’t advance as a species but social wise change is always met with animosity, when schools were being built for black and white people to go to during the civil rights movement, people hated it calling it “an abomination”. During the Woolwich crisis when the terrorist made a video talking about how he killed that soldier in the name of Allah days after people vandalised mosques in Kent and the English Defence league marched through Woolwich and London. Change is inevitable it’s physically impossible to go through life without having our equilibrium disrupted we need to learn to move with the times or get left behind
In conclusion what all of these points have in common is ignorance, to quote Martin Luther King:
“Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity”.