Generation Doomed
I bumped into an old friend a few days ago who told me that one of the "successful" sporting graduates from my school days had decided to hang himself in a nearby sanitarium. Just how had he got there? A few years ago he was playing up front for York City and was the subject of a possible one million pound transfer to Sheffield Wednesday...
Apparantly a spiralling heroin addicition saw him kicked out of club after club until he had a complete collapse. The Ultimate in collapses. He was sectioned in our local "mental health hospital" and had access to the means to end his life. His life had not been an easy one. He was a black guy with white foster parents. Turns out, kids can be cruel.
Still, he always had his sporting talent to fall back on and while I was slugging it away in a call centre he was earning a thousand pound a week and having all his accomidation and travel paid for. Based on this I cannot see why he ever felt the need to anaethetise his pain with heroin. He had other means with which to do it, and he must have known that heroin is not exactly conducive to a sporting career.
I suspect that he never knew exactly why he was doing what he was doing. Rather, there was some kind of in built self destructive trend that he could not resist and lead him down dark paths without him figuring out why he was treading them.
Much like the guy I used to live with who now sells the Big Issue on my local streets - another product of foster care. Or an old friend from school who has been missing for 2 years. Or the best guy I ever knew, who died in the Iraq war...
There are many others. Too many to mention, list and do justice to with a few anecdotes. It feels to me that there is some kind of in built programming that we cannot override. Maybe you can call it fate, but I look around at the faces that shine with defeat around me... We are resigned to this biological sub-routine kicking in and we know there is nothing we can do. We will be seduced by this calling. It is the old matter of time.
Apparantly a spiralling heroin addicition saw him kicked out of club after club until he had a complete collapse. The Ultimate in collapses. He was sectioned in our local "mental health hospital" and had access to the means to end his life. His life had not been an easy one. He was a black guy with white foster parents. Turns out, kids can be cruel.
Still, he always had his sporting talent to fall back on and while I was slugging it away in a call centre he was earning a thousand pound a week and having all his accomidation and travel paid for. Based on this I cannot see why he ever felt the need to anaethetise his pain with heroin. He had other means with which to do it, and he must have known that heroin is not exactly conducive to a sporting career.
I suspect that he never knew exactly why he was doing what he was doing. Rather, there was some kind of in built self destructive trend that he could not resist and lead him down dark paths without him figuring out why he was treading them.
Much like the guy I used to live with who now sells the Big Issue on my local streets - another product of foster care. Or an old friend from school who has been missing for 2 years. Or the best guy I ever knew, who died in the Iraq war...
There are many others. Too many to mention, list and do justice to with a few anecdotes. It feels to me that there is some kind of in built programming that we cannot override. Maybe you can call it fate, but I look around at the faces that shine with defeat around me... We are resigned to this biological sub-routine kicking in and we know there is nothing we can do. We will be seduced by this calling. It is the old matter of time.
posted by Richard Lewis at 2:13 PM
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