Opinion: Kids these days spending too much time outdoors

Guest Writer Johan Van Eksteen is back once more, folks, with those blistering words of truth and power that move whole crowds to cheers and tears. This time, he’s stumbled upon a very disturbing modern trend that every parent should be very, very concerned about indeed.

Dear Readers, I think I’m finally getting old. This weekend, sitting at home with the curtains drawn so that the bright sun and rolling verdant pastures in front of the ocean by my summer house don’t cause a glare in my 24-inch plasma, I heard a strange, strange noise. Cracking the windows and looking – eugh – outside, I eventually managed to choke down my Gollum-esque sun-hissing long enough to see a truly shocking, disturbing sight.

Children going outside, making forts, playing games and climbing trees.

Seriously, WTF is this kak?

When I was a kid we never had such luxuries. We had to be content to sit indoors all day, staring for hours at a time at a flickering screen, our necks craning downwards into glowing screens. Hell, if I even so much as mentioned spending a few wasted minutes out in the sun and air, my parents would have given me the most massive hiding, or at least left a downvote on my Reddit post.

And yet those were special days. Who could ever forget the magic of getting your first 30 likes on one post? Which of us don’t warmly cherish all the lols and rofls we had with our family? These are the things that make childhood the magical period of innocence and wonder and reposting it is.

All this gambolling and frolicking can’t be good for you: in fact, I think it could be destroying this country’s morals. There is so much life happening in the palms of our hands, and there they all are: outside, breathing in pollen-heavy, insect-infested air in the garden. God, yesterday I had to confiscate their soccer ball and then send them to their rooms with the door locked and shades drawn just so they’d say a perfunctory ‘lol’ to the memes I posted on their walls.

Nature:  a truly revolting, dangerous wasteland brimming
with spiders, disease and all kinds of horrors.

How are you supposed to make friends without adding them online? We need to do something to stop this scourge on our children’s innocence and wonder before it kills it altogether. How will our children ever be able to cherish these special, magical moments without a selfie or status that gets 23 likes and 15 comments in just 15 minutes?

Worst yet are these insufferable books they’re constantly reading. You look up from your iPad at the dinner table and the little vacuous snots have it right on their lap – they can barely go two minutes without looking down at it. And it’s not even a goddamn Kindle; what could be so interesting about paper and ink anyway? It seems that every two seconds I’m telling my kids “geez, Frikkie and Johan Junior, put that bloody thing away”.

We need to take a stand: these balls and games and frolicking in the untouched splendour are creating a generation of hyper-active, anti-social-network loners who don’t even once take part in conversation with their friends and followers; and all the while their iPads and Gameboys and Playstation 4s and Facebook accounts gather dust, forgotten and unappreciated.

In fact, I could go one step further and say that these so-called “physical sports” are warping our kids’ brains and teaching them to be violent. Every day, after my daily stress-unwinding LAN session of ThroatSlit MurderKings 5 I sit back in creeping, overwhelming terror and think about how my kids might be outside, rugby tackling each other, stomping on each other’s’ fingers and hands in that “ruck” thing, or sitting in giant stadiums at school yelling blood-thirsty war-cries at another bunch of kids whose only difference is that they go to some other school.

I know that my own grandparents thought I was spending “too much blerrie time on that blerrie computer thing”, but this is obviously a totally different situation. If we do nothing, we stand to pay the worst price of all: we could end up with a generation of children who think that they should empathise and try to understand that their own children might have their own personal interests and passions that are vastly different to theirs.

Or – God forbid the thought – that they shouldn’t tell their kids to do something just because they did it for years on end. What kind of mad, insane world might that be?

Johan is a guest columnist at Muse and Abuse. Widely renowned for his non-nonsense approach to controversial topics, Johan shines a blinding light of truth on subjects like the hideous scourge of immigration, why white people should vote ANC, why Blackface isn't the real racist problem in SA, and how Black Privilege is an ugly truth that no one wants to admit. He also thinks gay marriage should have been outlawed years ago.

Peace, security would “cripple” South African economy

Economic and financial experts have today blasted various religious and political parties’ calls for “peace and non-violence between South Africans and an end to rampant theft, rape and murder rates”, saying that such an outcome would “utterly devastate” the South African economy.

“South Africa does have massive multi-million rand industries like agriculture and mining to buff up its GDP,” said Editor of The Financial Times magazine Ray Zintaxes, “but our biggest industry by far is the multi-billion-rand-a-year industry centred mostly on paranoid white people and combating crime. Without crime, our economy would fall to shambles.”

Many other experts and politicians have agreed with this assessment, saying that the calls for peace and safety for all in South Africa are “too rash, too hasty [and] totally short sighted.”

“If we look at projects like Nkandla, you can easily see how the economy would be affected,” said ANC spokesperson, Chi Fwip. “If Zuma didn’t fear for his life and safety, hundreds of security contractors, many of them my personal friends and family, would be homeless, broke, unemployed and destitute. We need crime now more than ever.”

Fwip added that without the constant fear of murder, rape, robbery, assault, farm killings, mugging, gang violence, grand theft auto and petty larceny, many thousands of South Africans would immediately lose their jobs as policemen, car guards, security guards, night-watchmen, private security company employees and security installation and maintenance professionals.

“It would decimate employment,” said Fwip. “And since ‘decimate’ means ‘to reduce by a tenth’ it would probably decimate it more than once.”

Fwip added that crime was the only source of income for many poor families and crack addicts in South Africa.

“Without crime, we’re taking away their only form of livelihood,” he said. “Every time a robber breaks into a house and stabs or shoots someone, he is creating employment and wealth not just for himself, but also for police officers, doctors, hospitals, funeral directors and grave diggers. You can see how such a call would create a domino-effect of havoc for our economy.”

This not the first bit of controversy to be raised about South African crime, however, as our Police Services, the SAPS, have been criticised and questioned time and time again, with theorists alternately saying South Africa would be a better place without them or defending the SAPS as “misrepresented by a biased, unfair media”.

Academics are now calling for more “thought and discourse” on the issue before making such rash calls.

“This whole problem is more complex than merely ‘oh, please stop raping and killing and stealing’,” said Securityologist at the Beijing University School of Security Studies, Shu Tsatukyl. “Without crime, there would be no police, and without Police around there would be no one left around to stop criminals. It would be hell. Like a South African Catch-22, but with fewer long words.”