WE CAN’T ALWAYS BUILD THE FUTURE FOR OUR YOUTH BUT WE CAN BUILD THE YOUTH FOR THE FUTURE

Other speech that I wrote for a speech comp

WE CAN’T ALWAYS BUILD THE FUTURE FOR OUR YOUTH BUT WE CAN BUILD THE YOUTH FOR THE FUTURE

Youth is always referred as a group of people who is rebellious, problematic and immature. When we mentioned unhealthy activities such as mat rempit, drug addicts and many more, teenagers will always be the first group to be associated with those crimes. Is this right? Why is it teenagers always to be the group to be perceived with such pessimism? I know you have the answer. But I believe we also have a group of adolescent who are free from such activity and they are the teenagers who will bring sunshine to the nation in the future.
This tendency to relate youth with these negative perceptions stem from the fact that many people are quite worried about the future. A wise man once said, if you want to see how a nation will look like in the future, you must look at its young people. It’s true that we can prepare amazing and fantastic things for the future of our youth but it means nothing at all if we neglect the youth in terms of their manners, beliefs and attitude. Building the future means you need to build the youth as well because it takes years or decades to build something but to destroy it only requires seconds. Therefore, this valuable asset called youth must be taken care of in order to guarantee a better future.

My dear friends,
To open up your eyes, I want to share with you the statistic of young people of the world today. It is quite a surprise to know that 80% of the Middle East population comprises of the youth. The increasing number of Arabic youth somehow does not tally with the number of youth in Western countries. In Europe, majority of its people are above 40 years old. This is somehow quite a worrying scenario for people in the West because they need more young people for their future. A political scientist, Sam Huntington, said the world is about to witness the clash of civilization between the West Civilization and Islamic Civilization. This phenomenon has also got to do with the fact that the number of youth in the Islamic nations is increasing. These are the youths who will shape the future of the nation and the world. And logically, when our nations have more youths now than the other nation, it is not possible that we can be one of the powerful nations in the world!
However, do numbers matter? To a certain extent, yes, it is. But we can’t deny that quality can win over quantity. This stresses the importance of building the youth. Abu Bakar As-Siddiq once asked on what was his dream said, ‘ I want to have more youths to be moulded.’ Why he asked for more youths instead of asking for more experienced old people? If we ponder about this we will realize that this great companion’s longing for young people was because of the fact he thought for a long term benefit. Youth needs to be educated because they are the ones who will influence the future. Besides, young people are strong and energetic and we should not let youth to waste their energy for something unbeneficial but instead youth needs to be encouraged to learn as many as they can. Being young means we have greater capacity to absorb and learn things. You must remember that in youth we learn and in age we understand! As all of you here are youth you must prepare yourself by learning in order to survive the future!

My dear friends,
You are the greatest asset that the nation has! Are you aware of this fact? The urge to develop the youth of the future is so great that the government has set up the “Program Latihan Khidmat Negara.’ Millions is spent every year for this programme and this shows how valuable you are to the country! However, developing a youth like you will result to nothing at all if you don’t have the will to change. I know many youth has this belief that being young means being free. Be free doing what? To be free to do anything that pleases you even though it means your own self-destruction! I’m not sure until how long today’s youth needs to hold to such hedonistic beliefs but I believe in what Nietzsche said that “The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently”. It seems that many youth has the same thinking that being young means you don’t have to think about serious things. My friends, the youth of the nations, think differently by believing that you should not substitute your intelligence with unworthy experience. You must use your young age with the intention to develop your mind for the future, not merely to satisfy your own desire for the sake of entertaining yourself. Youth must learn as much as they can before it is too late.

Ladies and gentleman,
The world is getting more complicated each day. So, we can’t really imagine how the future will turn out to be. This makes it rather impossible to predict the future and that is why we can’t really prepare the future for the youth but we can prepare the youth to face the future. We are living in the world where anything can happen without prior notice. Therefore, I would like to encourage everyone especially teenagers to use time wisely in preparing themselves for the future which is full of challenges and impossibility. This is how you can help yourself, your country and your religion. The late John F.Kennedy once said this famous quote in his speech, ‘Don’t ask what your country can do for you but ask what you can do for your country.