MARINDOTI OLUDARE FROM PUNCH
The year was 1954 when 25-year old Martin Luther King Jr became a pastor in the Dexter Baptist Church. By 1955, a now 26-year old King organised the Montgomery bus boycott in protest of the Jim Crow laws that enforced racial segregation in the Southern United States.
As a 32-year-old, he had started the non-violent Albany movement against all forms of racial segregation in Albany Georgia. As a 34-year-old, he had also started the Birmingham campaign against racial segregation and economic injustice where he was jailed, during which he wrote the famous “Letter from Birmingham Jail.”
It was at this same age that King organised the epic March on Washington where the now renowned “I Have a Dream” speech was made.
At 35, his agitations had led to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that ended racial segregation and turning 36, he had achieved the Voting Rights Act of 1965 which ended disenfranchisement of black people in the United States and the Fair Housing Act of 1968 that improved the living condition for poor people. King Jr was assassinated on April 4, 1968. He was a mere 39 years, 79 days old.
The difference between the youth at the time and the youth of today is their level of understanding. King was able to achieve so much because he understood the problems facing his community and had the intellect to advocate strategic solutions to them.
The same cannot be said of the current crop of youths in the world (a demography to which I belong). Our intellect has been so much impugned by social media that we neither have time nor interest to lend ourselves to critical thinking. We are oft obsessed with such inanities as our number of followers on social media or the number of likes our posts garnered.
We care not for consecution before the execution of our most flighty of ideas. We don’t think, we just do and that often leaves us lost in the wilderness. Things around us happen so fast, too fast for us to mentally catch up. Before checking the posts of our friends and millions of funny characters with an influence (influencers) across all social media platforms, 24 hours of our day have been exhausted and it’s a constant vicious cycle that shows no sign of abating.
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