Reminiscing about the good ole' times

I've never been able to recall much from my early life. Occasionally a topic will come up, and I will receive a snap shot, blurred and rehashed. I fancy that I can see the huge hill upon which our creaky house sat, basking in the harsh North Carolinian (Carolineian?) sun. A flash of my best friend when I was eight, both of us rolling around with bike helmets despite being no where near bikes. Because that's just what you did.

But still, never have I felt connected to my past. When I truly try to think about it, I am only left with a vague impression of being lost. Say what you will about the psychological and sociological relevance of being raised the youngest of four boys - it doesn't change the fact that, up until my mid to late teens, I was entirely adrift.

Now, on one hand I know this is somewhat normal. Who knows who they are when they are thirteen? It is a fundamentally awkward period, where the body and mind need to simply stretch their limbs and aren't so concerned with what those limbs hit. On that inevitably other hand, however, I feel robbed, cheated. Almost as if someone has stolen from me the chance to have a developmentally helpful childhood and left me only with these ambiguous flashes and this vague gnawing void.

I did foolish things for no reason. Porno was not supporting the degradation of women and giving into a baser nature, it was a curiosity. Spending hours and hours playing video games was not unhealthy, it was my escape and savior. Nearly failing out of school was not an action I regretted or planned, it was just the knee-jerk impulse of a mind more full of flotsam than purpose.

Indeed, there wouldn't be a Robbie to type this blog post if it weren't for a few key figures providing crucial life lines. My comrade Orion on The Candy Coating is one, my older brother Brent another. Perhaps the biggest was my best friend danio - a man so filled with virtue that he seemed to ooze it from his pores as a normal man would sweat. Though many years my senior, he had the goodness of heart and the perspicacity of spirit not to see the weaning fop that I was but the conscientiously noble being that I, like each of us, had the potential to be. If not for these folks, ladies and gentlemen, I simply wouldn't exist.

So it is with this background and this frame of reference that I shiver for today's upcoming generation. I am only twenty years old, but already I feel the guilt of passing to their still fragile shoulders the weight of a such a heavy, twisted world. Sometimes I wish that I were a Titan incarnate, that I could merely spread my arms and shelter them from a world entirely concerned with their exploitation and assimilation.

It is no idle cause. No fundraiser created by an unknown charitable group. This is as real as it gets: Junior youth are dying. Mentally decaying, spiritually oppressed, physically poisoned - they are being slaughtered every single day and it just about breaks me in two when I consider the scope of it all.

For Bahai's, we can turn to the Junior Youth Animator courses, a series of courses designed to arm junior youth of every creed and background to grapple with such a monstrous world. But this is not enough. Everyday I live and breathe on this earth I search for at least one child, one youth that I can help in the way that danio helped me. It's not even a matter of kindness. I have to do so, I must save at least one. To do otherwise would be to betray the trust I have been given, and to usurp the second chance that life, despite my unworthiness, has seen fit to bestow on me.

As real as it gets. Youth and junior youth are not the future, they are the now. They are not promising, they are promise fulfilled. But they are also lost, like I was. No quarter a day is required, no monetary grant can assuage this debt. All that is required - all that is needed - is for each of us to open up on our islands of stability a tiny plot for them to call their own. With such a simple act we are ensuring the future, yes, but we are also insuring ourselves. The call is clear, the need apparent. To sit idle is to fail, while the mere act of arising is to achieve the most complete and perfect of victories: the victory of giving life.