Not my view.

First things first, these are not my opinion. Seriously, no.

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.