The New Zealand herald reports that New Zealand teenagers Ella Yelich-O’Connor (aka Lorde) and Lydia Ko have made the top two spots in Time Magazine’s Most Influential Teenagers of 2013 list. The New Zealand media have been reporting this story over and over, celebrating the wonderful achievements of our very own Lorde and Ko.
I am sorry to break it to my fellow kiwis but this is not something to celebrate. Lorde and Lydia are clearly very talented and have managed impressive achievements that we should admire, but any list that puts them (and Kendall and Kylie Jenner of Kardashian infamy) ahead of Malala Yousafzai, the 16-year-old Pakistani activist who was shot in the head and the neck for defiantly promoting girls’ education under Taliban rule, is to put it bluntly a travesty and a joke.
Record and magazine sales are not going to have the long lasting cultural influence that women being educated in regions where this is not happening will.
We should be ashamed that our cultural priorities are such that we celebrate music and sport over heroic self sacrifice, courage in the face of death, and that we engage in self-congratulatory nationalistic praise that such priorities put our teens on top.
Tags: Kardashians · Lorde · Time Magazine1 Comment
A common objection to belief in the God of the Bible is that a good, kind, and loving deity would never command the wholesale slaughter of nations. In the tradition of his popular Is God a Moral Monster?, Paul Copan teams up with Matthew Flannagan to tackle some of the most confusing and uncomfortable passages of Scripture. Together they help the Christian and nonbeliever alike understand the biblical, theological, philosophical, and ethical implications of Old Testament warfare passages.
I believe this phenomenon of celebrating superficial achievements is also prevalent in other cultures around the globe. When one soberly thinks about it, the world’s priorities are pretty much screwed up. We need young people who can influence their peers through more substantial and genuinely life uplifting endeavors.