With or without the mask the youth identify who’s fake - EDITORIAL

Sri Lanka values its next generation and that’s why parents will go to any extent to spend on their education. Much of this education will happen abroad and will be termed as higher education. There will be a large number of children who will have to remain here and see to their futures due to the lack of finances to immigrate. What would the ‘attitude’ of the majority of these children be in terms of being part of the island’s work force? 

This writer read somewhere that the present generation of youth has immense intelligence, disregards race and religion, will not be loyal to the government or organizations that employ them and wouldn’t be restricted even if they are born with physical limitations. The big question is how then can a government control them?
These youth would be loyal only to themselves. They’ll ask the question ‘what’s in it for me’ before they undertake a job. Asking them to offer their valuable time for free at social responsibility projects would look silly. 

They’d engage in quality time; even when they’re with their parents. This country cannot expect these children to work according to the job description laid out by institutes that employ them and expect them to hang around after work hours and see ‘how useful they can be around the place’. The present day youth have killed the thought of doing work of a ‘voluntary nature’. Now the qualities to praise are the ability to evolve fast, being less emotional, considering achieving the unthinkable and being ruthlessly efficient. 

Just imagine stepping into an era where no physical money is used; a time where transactions are completed with the waving of the tiniest of cards or through the use of a chip in a camera which produces personal and bank details of individuals or customers when the image of a face is captured in a single click inside a super market. Mechanical would be the best word to describe human relationships then. Just to add to the scary things that have happened around the world we read how a Chinese artificial intelligence engineer had married the robot he made in the year 2017.  Consistent nagging by parents to find a partner and his failure in finding a human spouse led him to take the hand of a machine.  

How can political parties engage these youth in political work at present? We can remember how former President Gotabaya Rajapaksa addressed groups of youth in the run-up to the presidential elections. He was telling them how to evolve in their businesses and save much travel time by working from home. Some of these sessions he had with our youth got wide television attention. Many believed he was the person who’d take over the reins of the country and rope in the youth to make their contributions. Sadly however it was the youth at the ‘aragalaya’ that drove him away. The youth who were at Galle Face were impatient. And when the quick fixes to the economy and solutions to their problems were nowhere in sight they rebelled. The youth eventually lost their trust in Gotabaya. They had to fall back on believing on an old saying ‘there is no evolution without a revolution’. 

There is a trailer being run on a leading television channel for an upcoming tele-series where the theme is about removing the plastic mask on an individual and getting to know the fake personality behind. The present-day youth know too much about this world full of fake people. Their intelligence is very high. The youth who leave the country and their contemporaries who remain here know equally about how much to trust when they deal with a politician. A young man might be aware that his dad or great grandfather rose up a few rungs in the social ladder thanks to the help of a politician. But that doesn’t in any way guarantee politicians the vote of youth during this era. The message they are giving is clear; ‘you can take the adults in this country for a ride, but don’t mess with the wrong generation… for the second time’.