The Effects of Excessive Individualism

When someone gets to college, when you are a teenager, before you get married ( bachelor parties) we are taught that the rite of passage is excessive hedonism at the cost of other individuals. We are taught that we ” only live once” and to be young and ” free ” to experiment before we get ” tied down”

Another example is through an artist’s depiction to be so excessively to be so unbridled in the freedom to express at the cost of other’s wellbeing. When we are surrounded by a sense that we should care about ourselves above anyone else.
On a contradictory note, we are also taught the paradigm of blindly following the status quo. The media teaches us suffocating collectivism to think a certain way, to be a certain way to have a certain fashion and mindset. It makes us believes we are individuals but we are really just part of the status quo. We are taught to accept things as normal…

If you watch MTV with an honest eye and compare it to five years ago, you are shocked at the graphic imagery portrayed, and we are forced as a collective to accept this. We are force fed ideas by our society without properly investigating the effect this has on our collective identity. We do not take responsiblity for things, but rather see things in terms of isolated events. We yearn acceptance from our peers so we no longer try to break free from these ideals.

In consuming media, about how we can just graciously accept that our only answer to solving problems is to consume. The society as a whole , despite pertaining to collective freedoms, does not react well when it goes adverse to what they are promoting.

We are taught in school that we can only be succesful through competition. We are taught in life that we should go to work, get a job , get a family and be part of the system. If we go against this we are being irresponsible, naive and backward. This suffocating collectivism causes us to impede our own sense of self and judgement and moral character.

All of these things block individual expression and ideas, block our sense of empowerment of doing things for ourselves, blocks us as a society to work as a collective unit, blocks our sense of wellbeing and our sense of trying to unite as a collective whole .

I firmly believe in the power of that at our core, we are all spiritual beings , and we must begin to care for all of us, we must constantly seek to know things without forcing on each other’s ideals. By celebrating diversity, we can create significant change. All of this is an organic process of growth for which we experiment and find methods , we reflect and continue to take action to find ways for significant growth.

This all sounds excessively intellectual. But it means that in our everyday life, we need to find ways to prefer others before ourselves and to constantly try and find new solutions to things, instead of blindly accepting paradigms.
…every day we are growing and learning new branches and facets of how to create a better society. It’s pretty amazing.

Mara Salvatrucha, Child Soldiers and War : Why not Thinking Ahead Can Make Things Worse

A month ago I was pondering on the issue of how easily junior youth  are targeted. In the media, adolescents are identified as the top consumers and movies and television are directly targeted for them. They are made for teens to consume more, to gobble up the latest trends and to ultimately feel towards themselves as the media sees fit. The genius of this is, they make it in a way that adolescents think that they are rebelling by becoming part of this movement.  It is highly reported that the more you expose adolescents to, the more likely they will consume what you have to offer.  We numb are kids with gadgets, we make their sense of worth be based on material wealth and consumption.

I usually do an exercise with the junior youth , which is for them to flip a magazine and ask them what they see. I then ask them to identify things with a critical eye, to see what the advertisement is really trying to tell you. We get so many messages piled on everyday about how we are supposed to think, act and identify with that we don’t even think about it. But the junior youth can make significant changes around them and actually teach their parents how things are done.

These are problems that junior youth face everyday. Usually people will say ” Well it’s not my problem,  the family has to be taking care of this”.  Well, I don’t feel that way. I feel that we should all work together, the parents being in the forefront , to allow themselves to become empowered.

Junior youth are targeted because they are at an age where their identity is still being formed. They are susceptible to all the messages and ideas around them. There are also times when in severe situations of war , this can become advantageous. An adult is not so easily swayed but  a junior youth can become swayed by the rhetoric which will have lasting effects on the world around them.

Literally, how we treat junior youth will lead to a lot of problems later on.  I will give you an example.  During the civil war in El Salvador, thousands of junior youth were recruited to become soldiers or guerrillas. They were exposed to a lot of violence, and were witnesses to  their families being murdered. Some of them became part of the very side that had murdered their families. Despite right-wing or left-wing rhetoric, both sides were to blame for this as both of them used adolescents to be part of their armies. Those kids , after the war, were now either adults or in their late teens. They knew nothing else but violence. That is what they were taught to be and that is their reality.

The United States granted many political asylum, and the idea was that if they left somehow they would have a better life. The reality was far more complicated. They arrived in Los Angeles and were targeted by the gangs in the neighborhood.  Whether they were attacked or they were again attracted to violence it was here that they formed two gangs, the Mara Salvatrucha and the L18.

If you watch the rites of these gangs today you can see that there are some very similar rituals to those Americanized gangs. The Salvadoran gangs quickly grew, adopting violence and crime as the way of life that was so familiar to them. Of course, this high level of crime leads them to be deported.

This deportation was not the end of the problem.  The deported members of the gang became increasingly restless and hostile of having being kicked out of the home they had known for so long. I remember being at an event at Proteccion al Menor and a former gang member threw a box at me and started yelling at me because of my American appearance.  When he opened his mouth he sounded completely American…because he was.

Those gang members would recruit people via the prison cells or in neighborhoods. Who would they target? You guessed it junior youth.  Because of the excessive migration to the United States, and entire amount of kids are usually left to their own devices while the mother tries to get a visa for them. These kids feel abandoned, and the gangs offered a sense of family that they never had. For them, violence and killing are signs of love and loyalty.  Their distorted sense of self revolves entirely around this.

It is really tragic if you think about it. Today, those gangs are the most violent in the world spreading their wings to many countries around the world and giving a concept that Salvadoreans are violent and abusive. The reality is much more complex.  Many countries , idealogies and fragmented thinking lead to this problem.  They are no longer the victims but become abusers.

This is why working on prevention is so important.  In the school that I am helping out with the junior youth program in El Salvador it now has the lowest index of violence in Santa Tecla. This is coming from girls who are generally from very humble homes and live in those neighborhoods infested with gangs.

I think the same way as I did in Spain : If I can reach one kid , and that kid empowers herself she can literally change her neighborhood and make it become a much better place. When we think that it isn’t our problem, when we believe that it’s someone else’s mess… well that’s where things get messed up.

We are all masters of our own decisions…. the other day I found out that a junior youth that had stopped going to the junior youth group had ended up in prostitution. It made me sad, and I wonder if her life would have been different if we had kept track , and tried to show that we cared more.

Junior youth can change the world, literally. Because of their susceptibility , they can either become pawns to other’s agenda, or they can become true agents of change.

I bring this up in light of the kony2012 campaign. Perhaps they may have good intentions , but if there are children soldiers, they have to be placed in an educational program which helps them let go of their trauma. They have to find way to find the underlying causes as to why this has happened and work on prevention methods. They need to be working in the surrounding areas and find out what the local people are doing to combat this problem. There are so many issues here that cannot be solved by simply putting one man away.