Courage

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R._N._Taber

Here in the UK, many if not most young people today have a rough time, especially given that they nearly always get a bad press. There is far too much stereotyping of young people going on. Most manage to rise above it all and make society proud. But if some appear to have lost their way in life, even despair of ever getting a job, whose fault is that? 

Youth unemployment is high across the whole of Europe, and what is being done about it? There is no quick fix, but just because people are young doesn’t mean they want and need to feel any less valued and inspired than the rest of us; if anything, they want and need to feel even more valued and inspired, not repeatedly written off for being lazy and/or potential criminals. Perhaps many don’t have the skills a modern society demands. So whose fault is that? What exactly are our schools teaching, for goodness sake? If education in our schools and colleges is meant to prepare young people for the roller coaster we call life, it doesn't strike me as having made a very good job of it for some years now. 

If mature adults are meant to lead by example, our ‘maturity’ has a lot to answer for. When I go shopping in London or just out for a walk, I am often appalled at the way some people of my generation behave.  Yes, some young people can be ‘difficult’ but my generation is certainly not blameless, and I can see how many younger people are inclined to write a good few of us off for being ‘difficult’, not least judgemental. 

So how about we all stop playing the blame game and give each other the respect and support every human being deserves?

“Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.”
― Winston S. Churchill

COURAGE

Wandering dark tunnels,

lost and afraid;

regulation torch for company,

imitation fur for the cold;

phone battery running low by now

heartbeat erratic, 
becoming harder not to panic,
yet where there's life, there's hope 
(or so they say.)

Live to fight another day?

Brave words

when the Dark is rising, Styx

threatening to burst

its banks, flood us, even drown us
should we cease
to negotiate our worst fears,

the darker comedy of our errors 

playing us for human

Look. Listen. Rescuers 
on their way;

Faith, Hope, Charity, children
of contemporaneity
come to lend lost souls a helping hand
who can but run the gamut
of a Here-and Now 
threatening to leave them behind

see them fail

Ah. but where failure rises above its tears,

find courage, too, behind closed doors

Copyright R. N. Taber, 2002

[Note: First published under the title 'Children of the Century' in First Person Plural by R. N. Taber, Assembly Books, 2002.]