Who influences you?

I’ve had the opportunity to spend some time with some teenagers the other day, and the level of conversation both astonished me in the positive sense, as well as left me pondering about who their role models are.

Now I’m not eluding to these particular teenagers, but to teenagers in general. I’m just going to put my findings below just to be able to ‘air’ them because truth be told I am troubled.

Let’s start with the level of conversation first. Smart, sassy and classy are words that I use to describe them. They know what they want academically, they were confident in their knowledge and where they wanted to go. So yay! Right? Well yes!

Then the conversation turned to life itself. Now of course these are kids below the age of 20 so they haven’t done much yet. And we’ve all been there: we thought we knew everything. So in this respect they were no different. But when the topic moved from academic to emotions, spirituality, exercise and the most troublesome of all for me: entertainment, that’s where my positive astonishment turned upside down into full worry zone. 

I’ll illustrate. At one point in time, the TV was on just for background noise. As I was positioned in front I asked if it could be turned to something else. Call me old (Fashioned if u will) but I have no need to watch naked women parade around semi aroused men all day. Sorry. 

To be clear, I said: I want to watch something which has NO VIOLENCE, and is just chill. What do they put the Tv on? A movie called Savage. Now I don’t watch TV so I don’t even know what it’s about. But I heard chain saw, I heard thuds, I saw bloodied whimpering people on their knees. I’m sorry but how is that for NO VIOLENCE and chill? When remarking on this, I’m told “oh but it’s nothing!”

So, I tried to explain what desensitized means to no avail. “Oh no that’s not happening to me!” So I told them to put something else on. And they put on a Series called “Locked up”. MY GOD IN HEAVEN! That was not fun to watch AT ALL! Human beings becoming less than humans, money rules, blood all over the place and people losing sense of right and wrong. It’s no wonder they have no empathy, sympathy or any type of other “pathy”. 

So the question then becomes… who influences you? Who influences these children when we are not there to monitor them? 

Ok I’m done ranting. Had to get this out of my system pfew! What do you think about being desensitized? Do you see the effects in people around you or even in yourself? Talk talk talk!