The Story
Today I woke up to a text message from my girlfriend saying that her final exam for high school was cancelled for the day and that it would be tomorrow. The reason? Weather conditions. So I get out of bed and head to my window expecting to see an apocalyptic snowfall. To my surprised the streets were as clean as a summer day. I go back to my phone and in a funny tone I ask my girlfriend why did they cancel if there is not a flake of snow outside. She tells me it was that they cancelled the school buses due to extreme temperatures. Again, I had some expectations in my head and so I turn on my TV expecting to see temperatures of about -30 degrees Celsius. To my surprise it was -17degrees Celsius; just a regular cold day of Canadian winter. After that, I get a couple of messages from girlfriend saying how cold it is and happy about school being cancelled; typical reaction, not only for her, but for all the kids when they learn the school day has been canceled. I lay in bed again and I really start thinking about the problems this conveys.
The Problem
As I get to my grade 9 class I see a kid rushing through the school doors. The kid was a little younger than I was (back home high school and elementary school are together); he was of darker complexion, he had dirty hands and shoes, and his shirt was untucked but he was fixing it as he was dashing through the doors. He held a red plastic bag in which he carried 1 notebook and a pencil. School hadn’t started to I begin a conversation with the kid and he was telling me how he had to run because he finished work later than expected. I got curious about a kid so young working (although is not a surprise in a third world country) so I asked him to tell me more. He starts telling me about how every morning he wakes up at 4 AM to go grind corn so that his grandma can make tortillas, once she is done making them he goes around the houses selling the tortillas and when he is done he gets ready and walks about 1.5 km to get to school. Although the kid inspired me some sort of sadness, this was nothing out of the ordinary in my country and specially in a public school. The problem starts with this little brats in the developed countries.
I lived in Nicaragua until I was well into my teen years and then I moved to Canada. I was telling my girlfriend how concerned I was about what she told me; she thought I was being extra until I started lecturing her on appreciation. How am I supposed to teach my kids to appreciate the commodities that they have, compared to the kid I met that day, if the school cancels a day for a bit of cold weather? Now just picture this: they didn’t cancel school, they canceled the buses for cold weather, this means that they wanted to save these teenagers the 30 agonizing seconds from their door to their school bus when back home you had kids, much younger, having to wake up to work and then walk ridiculously long distances. This is a concerning problem, younger generations, especially 2nd generation immigrants, will kill the values that their parents acquired through sacrifice, they are growing up in houses in which the temperature can be controlled, in a country that doesn’t want you to take 30 seconds of cold breeze to get to school, in a life where everywhere they go there is internet connection so that they can snap their food at the mall with a caption “Friday vibes”. The parents of these kids most likely had leave all of their lives back home so that these little brats can call an Uber when it’s raining and they can’t walk 10 min. Their parents struggle with language, alienation, and adaptation to a new country so that they can slam the door screaming “I’m not your slave” when asked to wash the dishes. Most likely their parents work a job that pays less than $20/hr and they have to work over time so that the little prince/princess can have the latest IPhone and then complain about the color of it.
If you’re a teenager who is just laying on his double bed with a 4K TV in your room, just reading this in your IPhone XS and you just slammed the door on your parents because they just asked you to take out the trash and your spoiled ass got mad cause it’s cold, I have something to tell you: you fucking disgust me and you are everything that is wrong with this generation. If you’re a parent and your kid just went to his/her room, where he has his IMac computer and a PS4, mad after you telling him or her to do laundry, get up and turn off the internet, take away his phone and his TV and his computer, and turn off the heat for 2 hours, I promise they won’t die. Take everything that had made him believe that getting all those commodities is easy. Take his gaming console and his headphones, leave him with just a bed and some blankets, and when his hunger is bigger than his pride and he comes downstairs looking for food tell him that he doesn’t have a maid and to cook for himself. Please, we have to teach this new generation to be grateful for all the things they have, we need to teach them to appreciate their internet and their phones and their car and their headphones because you worked hard to give it to them and it’s not fair that they take it for granted. If our society doesn’t learnt to appreciate big commodities like a car or a $1000 phone, then how can we even phantom to appreciate smaller and less noticeable things such as love, compassion, and kindness.
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