By Omooba Adewale Olayemi
I was surfing the net this morning when a post on Facebook from Kemi Olunloyo, pharmacist, journalist and publicist, caught my attention.
Olunloyo reminded her fans that today 11th October 2022, Ramon Abbas, popularly known as Hushpuppi turns 40. She wished him a happy birthday and attached two pictures of Hushpuppi in his days of living in opulence through the money gotten from wire fraud.
Olunloyo further stated that life begins at 40 in prison for the international fraudster. Obviously, she was alluding to the fact that a life of crime never pays.
Hardly has she uploaded the message before the Hushpuppi mob swooped on her baying for blood.
It is instructive to note that there are two things about the responses to the post.
One, majority of the respondents who are youths did not apprehend the message in the post.
Two, they exhibit the decadence that pervades the age we live in.
It is so sad that today, the average young person’s mind is so cluttered that they find it pretty difficult to think straight because they have not been sufficiently tutored nor learn enough to decipher what is wrong and right. They are more of a rudderless ship on the sea without a sailor. And that explains the free fall of our society from grace to the gutters.
The person who posted the message about Hushpuppi, the international fraudster, is old enough to be a mother to most of the youngsters who responded, yet that was not enough to be a restraining anchor for them. They unleashed a vitriolic on her that shows that they lack proper upbringing and grooming by their parents.
I was disturbed by the herd thinking that Hushpuppi has done nothing wrong. It was so bad that a young girl saw him as a hero and prayed for his freedom.
The Hushpuppi fans idolized him because he resonates with them as the spirit of the age. It says, “Be rich at all costs or die trying”. For our young people, school where you acquire knowledge to function as a good citizen who will see the benefits of pursuing the good of the whole, is sadly now seen as a scam. It no longer matters to undergo tutelage and refinement. To be crude, uncouth and irritating is now cool and fashionable.
Edmund Burke, Irish statesman and philosopher, gave us a peep into what is to come as per the future starting today when he said, “Tell me what are the prevailing sentiments that occupy the minds of your young men, and I will tell you what is to be the character of the next generation.”
It is a tragedy of monumental proportion that while young people in the developed world are coming up with disruptive ideas to tackle serious problems facing our world today in the areas of clean energy, economy, climate change, food production, high technologies, advancement in the medical sciences etc, majority of our young population are focused on one thing, how to acquire money and wealth without work, so as to consume the good things of life produced by hard thinking youths from other climes.
We need not gloat over the inadequacies of our system as an excuse for indolence, crime and a life of criminality. It does not just add up. It speaks volumes about who we are as a people and the direction in which we are going. He who sows the wind will surely reap the whirlwind.
Those who unleashed venom on Kemi Olunloyo, are no doubt, the entitlement seeking generation created by a warped thinking that young people should be pampered and not be allowed to suffer for anything or be made to experience the flip side of life.
Against the run of nature, they seek to have the best of everything at the cost of NOTHING! The feeding bottle generation has come home to roost and we better be prepared, for the rampaging bull has come of age. It can only get worse, not better.
