Be wary of youth embracing the popcorn, burgers, and the fantasy world of film

Uncultured:Oscar KimanukaThroughout our region, particularly in urban centres, a new culture has taken hold of our youth, the most productive part of our population. This irresistible yet corrupting culture of laissez-faire mingled with tinges of vulgarity and fast life is a source of worry to many observers. The more we see things, the more we begin to entertain them as if they are all normal. This experience is to say the least, profoundly dispiriting. Our much cherished mobile phones, tools of our globalised world, have become embarrassing features of modern day life. While it may have sounded offensive to talk loudly on yourmobile phone when these gadgets began to be widely used, today, such an embarrassment is long gone. As we all observe, we jabber away without the slightest regard for those around us, our private lives are casually and routinely spilled into the public space, our voices loud and clear and our language increasingly coarse. We have lost the important sense of publiccourtesy.The film, video and television industries continue to happily present crime and violence as great entertainment, to the delight of ourunsuspecting youth. I think it is legitimate to criticize the film industry for unashamedly glamorising violent crime and portraying gangsters as heroes. It is almost impossible for parents to develop and nurture the whims and desires of their children because the whims and desires are seriously being nurtured by the commercials they seeon television. This is what T.S Eliot, a recipient of a Nobel prize in Literature in 1948 calls “the permanent things”—love, truth, compassion, virtue and beauty. More often than not today we find the market extremely hostile to such values. We may unknowingly be embracing a culture in which we treat each other like products.Our print and electronic media have become ‘innocent’ accomplices in the creation of this new culture that worships anything and everything new and foreign. In most of East Africa, children are becomingstrangers to their own language and culture and are urban creatures that cannot be identified in terms of their own nationalities. Andwhat do we or our children read, listen to or watch in our print and electronic media on a daily basis? We feast on a rich menu of pop and pornography, violence and trendy lifestyle and we think this is good and modern.And what is the genesis of all this if we may ask? In the last two and a half decades of the twentieth century, more than ever before, people in different countries began to worry about the emergence of a global economy and, therefore, a global culture in what Thomas Friedman, in his “The World is Flat” ably describes. Rapid technological change, the impact of mass communications, rampant consumerism and the decline of national languages and identities – all previously seen as the products of America’s cultural imperialism – were regarded less as the fault of the United States than as the result of international trends beyond the control of governments everywhere, including the one in Washington.Globalisation, as observed in my previous writing, is a term that is very much in vogue, was a vague and to some a terrifying concept. In its most benign construction, it meant free-trade agreements and the opening of borders for the unfettered movement of goods and services, people and ideas. In its more ominous construction, it referred to the world wide computer-linked interdependence of banks, financial markets and stock exchanges, along with the wave of mergers and acquisitionsthat led, in the 1980s and 1990s, to a growing concentration of economicpower, especially in the United States.The international popularity of movies, television, pop music, popcorns, theme parks, shopping malls and the internet made itincreasingly difficult for democratic governments to shore up their local cultural industries or influence what their citizens saw anddid. Worse, a global culture threatened to obliterate regional and local eccentricities, promoting instead a set of universal values andimages that made the world more homogeneous and much less interesting. And as if in desperation, we have slowly but surely succumbed to these new and ominous forces and occasionally mildly dismiss those with anxiety as misguided and confused ‘critics’ of the inevitable global trends that are in vogue. There is probably some consolation for us. We still hold closely our language, culture and ethos that define us as a people. The Intore and the Ingando are some of our cherished cultural attributes that evoke our collective sense of belonging. Let us not lose the fabric that binds us a nation and people despite the ominous forces of the pop, burger and film culture.

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Be wary of youth embracing the popcorn, burgers, and the fantasy world of film