The Youth Of Today

The press love a good story with the tone 'look at the youth of today, look how terrible they are". Last night I attended a concert that proves just the opposite.
My niece is a fantastic musician and is a member of one of the North Lanarkshire Schools Music Groups. Their spring concert showcases the talents of around four hundred young people in the county. There was a range of different musical styles in the concert including jazz, rock, classical and traditional. There is a pipe band, a woodwind orchestra, a symphony orchestra, as well as a development group for younger children. Every single piece of music was delivered with professional levels of musical ability, timing and polish.
All of this requires incredible dedication from the young people and their teachers. The council, another much maligned group of people, deserve enormous credit for encouraging and developing the musicians in the county. It's time that those in positions of power realise how important these young people are to the future of this country.
All across the UK, there are many young adults just like the musicians I saw last night. They participate with passion and dedication in art, sport, science or music, help charities and are members of youth groups. I am not saying that everyone can be a musician or an artist but there are many who will bring the same level of passion and skill to whatever they do. We cannot leave them to rot away in low paid work or worse still on the dole. We cannot destroy their dreams of building a career and leave them as a wasted generation. We can't continue to give tax breaks to the rich, while freezing the minimum wage for young people and expect them to want to do their best for their employer.
If you read the press, the youth of today are all drug addicts, knife-wielding drunks and wasters. The truth is the hidden majority are decent young people with skills and dreams who deserve better than the contempt they receive from their elders. They deserve a chance to stake their future in a better country, not to be left to waste away or to be turned into a third world work force.
Time to put the fine young people at the heart of what we do in this country, because they deserve it.