The violences that affect the reality of the girls and teenagers

How doesn’t it start with a cry, very often suffocated, rarely heard, but always very quickly understood in the deepest part of good reasons and clean consciousness.

Luckily, the International Working Bureau is working so that we remember that today, in 2005, eight million four hundred thousand children remain subdued in the entire world. Let’s make it clear: nowadays, eight million four hundred thousand children are being reduced to slavery in the world.

       They make match boxes,        
       they break stones in quarries,
       they knit rugs or
       languish in mines.

There is always a good reason to justify children’s work. It is so comfortable to use them to slide through the coal cracks where adults can’t go through because of their heights!. Or also these children-slaves are “good for anything”, as maids, always the work, no salary or schedule, no laws to protect them. They are at the service of rich people. These children are not more than things or objects.

It is clear that nowadays slavery is illegal but economy will always find good reasons to silence the reality and even justify slavery in children.

The difference is that today, violence that affects the reality of the girls and the teenagers threaten them in two ways that are apparently contradictory.

This violence can be poverty,
this interlocking in which the poors don’t have any other way out than becoming even poorer as the rich ones, in any way and anything that happens, will become even richer. This chain of hunger, illiteracy, underdevelopment, exclusion leads directly to slavery.

Or on the other hand, and this is the second way, the violence
 that touches the reality of the girls and teenagers, that condemn them to superabundance, over production, excessive consume. An important part of the nowadays girls and teenagers population don’t have any other model, any other vocation, any other call than being consumers. In the end they are also condemned to not being more than slaves…but consuming slaves.

This is the economy that reigns everywhere as the owner and which is invested on educating humankind. It is enough for humanizing humankind that the machine works. Violence and liberal economy supporters want to convince us of that. We, but mainly and essentially the girls and teenagers, as well as anyone, are asked to consume, to enjoy and overload the rubbish bin so that the « machine can work ».

For a long time, it was believed that the wish couldn’t work by ordering it, until one day it was discovered that inventing and fulfilling with advertisements was enough to create wish or at least impose in everyone, no matters the age, the wish that must be wished.

To be honest, it is the whim that replaced the wish, of course, this doesn’t need to answer the true necessities of the girls and teenagers. These wills are enough to answer what the market economy waits from them. It is clear that advertising elaborated for a product doesn’t show in anyway that this product has the best “quality-price relation”. The advertisement made for a product only shows one thing: that the enterprise that sells it has enough money to invest in advertising.

The truth has never belonged to the ones who shout louder and the ones who make disturbs. If everything can be object of consume, everything can enter the market game. Why don’t we dare to say it?

Every moment  is bigger the amount of people who think that religion, catechesis and faith must enter with enthusiasm a spiritual market and that the day when hyper and supermarkets have open stands hat offer religious wishes, the future of the church will be granted. Of course this market is completely to be created. The same way we create the wish for a trainers trade mark, a tattoo in the legs, a piercing in the belly, or a hair style or a DVD, why couldn’t we in the same way create the wish for religion? Every day the number of people who think that is bigger.

If we only try to respect this fashion logic, the mission that Baden Powell has trusted in scouting and guiding and that he had formulated in this way : « to be useful citizens » today would be « to be consumers » because nowadays it is the only open way for the girls and teenagers to fulfill their mission of being « useful citizens ». But honestly, could we trust in economy in such a way that we blindly try in its own work ?

                            

Night and day, the girls and the teenagers don’t stop being besieged by the pushes, urgencies and will. It is not any more the meeting with the other what will become the bases of the society future but the ghosts and pushes of my own wishes claiming its “I”. My wishes are the ones that have to make the machine work and it isn’t the society’s business. The consume-society don’t need to find a sense, it itself is its own sense. Having a machine that works as it does is enough. Nowadays technologies and its endless worldwide system, go on seeding everywhere the wishes and requests.

Today, the girls and teenagers don’t need the others. This article of the girls’ law in scouting that prays « always think about the others » doesn’t mean anything anymore. A nowadays girl doesn’t live with the others anymore but with the screen, the TV’s screen, the computer’s one, the video games’ screens or the mobile telephones’ ones. Means of communication have invaded the world of wishes and desires.

And this is a field where every time it’s more difficult making the difference between communication and means of communication, superfluous things are part of and totally integrated in the communication itself. Today we find improbable that a cellular is only to make calls. Nowadays telephones have to be able to take pictures, make videos, create a DVD, transmit TV chains, send e-mails, send or get SMS, listen to radio programs, download the latest hits…not mentioning, of course, all the rest that we only have to desire.

I know teenagers that spend ten hours in front of the screen. In that world do we still need the others? It’s clear that we need “the others” to have an addressee to communicate. I know teenagers that have made possible to communicate themselves with friends that were on the other extreme of the world. Now their next exploit is to be in contact with four interlocutors at the same time… but all the same they have nothing to say they only have to satisfy their desires.

On the other side, now that the cinema counts big numbers how can we still call it cinema? Now that images are directly under virtuallity, where is reality? isn’t virtuallity more real than reality? where is reality? Which are the references that the nowadays girls and teenagers can take as bases to “sail their lives” without seeing them devoured by infernal anguishes that, all the same, among drugs, wishes of being the best of the best, exciting and calming pills don’t have any other purpose than creating new slaves.

Do we have to jump to the conclusion that scouting and guiding have become out of fashion? In the 20th Century, the scouts and guides helped in the education of generations of children, teenagers and youngsters basing themselves on life in nature, life in teams, progress, promise and law.

In a world that is bursting: politics and religion, philosophy and psychology, human science and own science, family and culture, evidently a new coat of paint won’t be enough for guiding and scouting to go back to its first vocation. At least one thing should be clear: the scouting and guiding objective could never be “ doing scouting and guiding”. The scouting and guiding goal would never be saving scouting and guiding. The same way that the church goal could never be reducing themselves to want to save the church by fulfilling its cult places.

When an institution, no matters which one, has no other goal than saving this institution as furniture is saved, this institution has no more reason to exist.

The scouting and guiding future could never be happy with making the scout and guide tent work. If it were like that, that would be a signal that scouting and guiding haven’t escaped from the violences of the consume economy: “making the machine work no matters the price”. The day scouting and guiding are useful only to make scouting and guiding work, scouting and guiding will have ceased being at the service of girls and boys to want girls and boys not to exist but only to keep effective and give benefits to make the “machine work”…

Even religion isn’t safe from those violences. It would be easily happy to « make go round » religion as we make the operation work. However, every time it is more evident that Gospel hasn’t as its goal saving God. In short, God behaves well.

The fleshing that since the beginning of the 19th century pretended God’s death, was at the end taken down by indifference. God would surely behave better, not by having full churches but if its doctrine accepted the fact that every man, every woman, every child can have the right to discover that nobody has the right to prohibit anybody to be loved by God.

The Gospel goal is, maybe, rather less protecting God from human foolishness than protecting humanity from every and each one against all the pervert violences attributed to God by the doctrinarian logic. The evangelic labor isn’t christianizing but allowing the human to humanize by its own love to God.

The first nowadays scouting and guiding responsibility can only be humanizing the children who are drown by the violences of consume under the excuse that they count on girls and boys to make the machine work. It’s not time to dream about the old scouting and guiding. It is more and more difficult to create a scouting and guiding that reaches the wishes of today men. Being a useful citizen is a different thing from being a proof consumer. The difficulty arises from the fact that ecology isn’t always seriously considered, politics is just derisive, the power is not more than founds misappropriation and influence traffic, and speaking about religion, it is only saved if it is aside from human experience, claiming that everything that could make the man grow, cannot be less than stealing from God. Ideologies are in bankrupt even though we haven’t gone out doctrine.

There are still men and women. We have “the other”. But does the other still exist? Can it go on existing? Is the other something else than and image on the screen?, is the other something else than just an image? Is the other, precisely, the scouting and guiding mission? Is the other the already set Warsaw ICCG Meeting, for July, 2006?

  Jean Debruynne -2005
  World Chaplain

                                                             Home
                               Meditación en español                 Méditation en français

                                                                         Home Meeting section

        Accueil-section française        Acogida sección en español    /  Home- english section