Being the extremely observant person that I am. A Social Examiner if you like!

I have been wathcing the trends that have rolled out in the last few years, Lance Armstonrg brought us the rubber wrist band phenominon, All beginning with a yellow rubber band and eventually taking over the world. Every organisation, corporation, camp and $2 shop had their own type. MAKEPOVERTHOSTIRY was early to jump on the wrist band train. It was quite a successful campaign until the whole world released their own wrist band. You ended up being able to get quality ones that said things like ‘Love”hope”friendship’ who wants that dribble?

People threw off their wristbands that scaled up their arms to the elbow. It’s hard to type with that many wristbands on, and computers hold the key to the next trend. Myspace.

In an effort to avoid face to face contact, and also in search of place where young people could share with each other who they bonked on the weekend, myspace was born! A place where online asthetics and quality html was thrown out the window and replaced with tiled images of sponge bob square pants and slow loading photo galleries with captions like ‘me and jim’ ‘me and jim again’ ‘me and jim with sophie lol’ ‘me and jim ’.

Everyone had to have a myspace, it was the place to be and it was set out so well. You get to write on someones page, then they login and write on your page. You end up spending 3 hours a day trying to work out what you said on their page to make them say that on yours, following a simple conversation now involved several clicks, muting of jackson 5 tracks, entering your password 45 times and waiting for 13 galleries of you and jim to load. In the end myspace stopped being the trend of the hour, people got so fed up with waiting for things to load that they made online pacts to end it all.

After the myspace revolution it was Emo’s. One depressive young person all in black who decided that their little brothers jeans that where 5 sizes two small would help them find their identity. In putting on the extremelly tight black jeans they managed to cut thier wrists whilst trying to do up their fly.As all young radicalls do they decided to then cut their own hair. Starting at the back of their head they began to trim, after 20 mins or so Mum came home and burst into the bathroom shouting ‘What are you doing Toby’. Toby slammes the clippers into the sink and stormed out of the bathroom shouting “you don’t understand me mum’. And this is how the Emo got their extremelly long fringe. Toby’s frineds who were aslo stuggling with their goth image decided to follow suit, cutting theor own hair, wearing tight black jeans and ensuring everyone could see the wounds from doing up their flys. Emo’s then faded out after they realsied that in trying so hard to not be goth and be different that they infact all ended up being the same, to steal a phrase from my buddy Ty, they became ‘MainstrEmo’.

So Emo’s faded out and that brings us to today. Today the trend is to save to world. but not just use light saver bulbs and recycle you dolly magazines and drive a prius but today it’s cool to start your own NGO.

It seems everyone is creating their own Charity that is saving the world one mission trip at a time.Now i know this is a bit of a tricky issue as a lot of people are trying to do great things. And peoples lives really are at stake, and we all must take action. But i’m not convinced that every church and every person needs to start their own NGO and go and build and orphonage.

Just becasue we have the money doenst mean we know what we are doing whehn we jump on a plane and go save the poor. We could infact be doing more damage as we take our stuffed up western culture into places that really dont need our influence. But rather need our support. Just becasue we are rich doesnt give us permission to do things our way in places that have never lived ‘our way’.

I hope this trend passes and that instead of going to do stuff we can start going to listen and learn stuff. That we can use the power we have here to influece Governments and descision makers, that we can use our money to support indigenous people doing community development rather than rich westerners going to fix stuff.