This is a draft article I wrote in class, that HAD to be written from an extreme point of view. I do not share the opinions of it, but that was the real test of the assignment. To write from a different point of view. Like I say, it's just a draft, and I will get comments on it next week.
The Society of tomorrow?
We can all relate to the sight of
under-age kids littering the street on a Friday night, starting fights, getting
drunk and causing trouble. Only the other day I saw a poor train conductor
getting abused for not allowing a drunken yob onto his train without money or a
ticket. Is this really the way society’s heading? In a decade or two, will this
behaviour become what middle-aged folk get up to every weekend? Surely not.
Yet we can’t pretend that this isn’t a
growing problem. More and more teens spend every weekend binge drinking, and
committing crimes. It isn’t just older children causing problems though. The
addictive nature of social media, TV and video games means that more and more children
are surrounding themselves with virtual realities where the morally unacceptable
is made possible. Call of Duty, Grand Theft Auto and Assassins Creed are all
sculpting our children into desensitized monsters.
Last year alone, 600 14-year-old
children were locked up in British jails, and the overwhelming trend was that
this number was made up of those from the poorest families. A mixture of
poverty, bad influences and a lack of education is leading our children astray
and breaking apart our younger society. It’s good to see that we are taking
action against these youths, by taking the right steps to correct their wrongs.
But it’s not just the children who
have to live in our broken society. Those of us who drink and act responsibly,
see our high streets taken over by gangs of chavs every weekend, and pay for
the damage when it is caused. It’s us who fund their jail sentences. It’s us
who have to provide taxes to cover their dole money. When we’re gone, there’ll
be nobody there to help them.
It seems that unless we move quickly,
our children will become the generation who wreck society, by taking all and
giving nothing. No wonder unemployment is so high, when they can’t stay sober
enough to get a job. Maybe soon, with the right treatment, they’ll begin to act
responsibly. Until then, we’ll just have
to carry on holding together a broken world.
