Comment on Deterioration of Local Community a Major Driver of Loss of Play-Based Childhood
lvxferre@mander.xyz 10 months ago
The author focuses on USA, but I’ve seen the exact same thing happening at least in my chunk of Latin America. Act II was considerably shorter, but the process was the same.
Religion protects young people’s mental health
It is not the religion itself, but the presence of a community strictu sensu, the sense of belonging, and the third places. We’re social beings and the churches spent 15 [?] centuries calling dibs on those, at least in Europe and the Americas; the dirty bathtub water (religion) was flushed out alongside the baby (third places).
Governments also played a huge role screwing over with your sense of belonging - because your feelings towards your local community competes directly with the feeling that you have towards “your” country. And yet you don’t get that sense of “I’m among my peers” from the later, only from the former.
andrew_bidlaw@sh.itjust.works 10 months ago
The edge case result of that shown in the russian youth: thenewtab.io/vovlech-v-vojnu/ (you’d need an auto-translator)
lvxferre@mander.xyz 10 months ago
That’s awful. It’s a government looking at that bored youth, who lacks a third space, and instead of fixing the problem, using the problem as a weapon. Throw in some incentive (easier access to uni = promises of a better life) and it’s a recipe for disaster. Eventually the war against Ukraine will end, but their militaristic mindset won’t - and the youth is now a bunch of old guys supporting a more militaristic government. (I guess Putler doesn’t care - dead by then anyway, right.)
And they still won’t get a sense of belonging from that. It’s still not creating a community, out of “people living near each other”.
Frankly I’m surprised that the govs here in Latin America didn’t have the same idea. Or perhaps they did; and failed - because Nothing Fucking Works® here.
(Thank you for sharing this link, by the way. It’s directly related to what I said about governments.)
andrew_bidlaw@sh.itjust.works 10 months ago
(You are welcome.)
From what I understood, it’s done only to affect\involve their parents and relatives without any long-term plans. The official putenjugend was created 10+ years ago and after some PR generally flew under radar. This wave started only after the average Vanya started to question the geostrategical masterplan around summer-autumn of 2022, and when army started to need more brothers and dads to serve. I don’t know if it makes it worse, but it sure makes it look more cynical towards kids and overall short-sighted. The latter may be for the better though.
I don’t know the specific term, but yeah, if they knit their self-worth around the rod of the battle banner, they form a codependency to that movement and feelings they’d eventually lose. Not to say they also skip classes, don’t socialize with their peers, miss out on many stuff they would hardly get back. Let’s hope they’d have less time to get used to it (:
It’d sure take Nothing Fucking Works over the Universal Bad Example.