The Sun and the Eagle

What a beautiful flag the Kazakh banner is! A golden sun radiating above a golden eagle in full flight. The turquoise blue of the background sky combined with the penetrating gold of the eagle and sun creates a union of colour like no other.

I have rarely seen a flag so joyous in its approach to the fundamentals of what makes it a country. Nevertheless, as I have seen over the past six weeks here, things are changing, and Kazakhs are ushering in a new era of modernity (because they are seduced by the idea of modern conveniences). With this modernity invariably comes the whittling away of the attention span: the youtube generation, the incessant watching of clips and short videos, the iPads and iPhones, the video games, the whittling away of youth and mind. It's all about consumption in the end, and Kazakhs are consuming frenziedly. It's a tough thing not to be seduced in such a harsh regime (parts of Kazakhstan are still very much Soviet with all that that entails). And the weather can be quite brutal, especially in winter. So, mod cons are very appealing.

Yet, I have no truck with the seduced per se, but rather with those who are doing the seducing. They really should know better. Invariably, it's the old exploiting the young, raping their very being so they can finance a lifestyle of gluttony and greed, and set themselves apart from those they are taking advantage of. It's a class thing, a pecking order thing, a primitive and bestial thing, and we in the west are all at some point or another so immersed within it that we really can't see the wood for the trees.

In my lessons, I have seen first hand how brainwashed some of these youngsters are. It's tragic. By the age of 18, they have a philosophy of life more befitting to 50 Cent than of any sensitive and mature human. They play video games constantly, inevitably war games that involve a serious amount of warfare. That people actually argue that all this tele-killing (whether via video games or watching it on the internet via movies and media) does not affect people in what they do is a measure of how utterly demented this modern world has become. By the age of 16, most youngsters, now, have seen an unholy amount of killing. Media channels too have now taken to broadcasting it in an effort to 'appeal by appalling', and of course it works. People in this respect create the futures they purport to detest. And yet because of their ignorance, and their puffed-up pride, they cannot see it. Whether it's CNN or the BBC or simply idiots like Bill Mahler or Jimmy Kimmel, or Seth Rogan and James Franco (so much for all those degrees!) inciting world war 3 (in the name of freedom of speech no less), the modern world is drowning in imbecility masquerading as virtue.

And so, it comes to Kazakhstan, the age of the ass, and the age of oblivion. And I feel like a lone wolf crying in the wilderness.

But they do have a beautiful flag!