Imignation, or Lack of...

Another Hate day dawns... and the subject of today is the lack of imagination the younger generation posses.

When I was younger (up until about age 11) I used to spend all my time playing 'imaginary games' ranging from fairy tales to mums and dads to the lion king and then to Easternders and the horror zombie movies as I got older. Slightly strange as I was, this is how I think children should spend their play times, climbing trees, running around etc etc. But it seems as though TV and the Internet have melted our brains to mush...
I asked most of my friends what is known as a 'creative thinkers question' a few days ago, which is basically a question which has a situation in which you have to think creatively to answer, and the answers I received were appalling.

The question was as follows:

Imagine you are stranded, alone, on a desert Island. There is no chance of getting off. You have enough food, water and shelter. What 3 luxury items would you want with you? And why?

Expecting people to come up with things that they supposedly couldn't live without, (like their phone, their friends and family, music, books, wii or whatever) I was ready for a lot of material possessions, rather than important things like happiness, health, etc. But instead the first answer was from my friend George: " A Boat. So I can get off the island" After explaining that the idea of the question was to see what the couldn't live without George said "Oh, okay my phone then." which I thought was getting there until he said "because then I can call up someone to airlift me out".

After several further attempts to explain the idea to him other people started to answer... Most of them said 'ipod' as the first item and when I said what If it runs out battery they named the charger as item two.. not realising there would be no power supply. In all fairness, not everybody was as bad as this, on balance, the girls seemed to do better than the boys and the ones that read often were the best overall. Still, I was shocked at this display of creativity (or lack of).

I remember a while back, when we were writing stories in English lessons at school, some people would spend hours trying to come up with ideas, and even then they weren't brilliant. That may sound a bit harsh, because I naturally find it easy to be creative and imaginative (probably because of all the fantasy books I read) but I remember finishing my whole story before the boy next to me had even done a line!!
What is wrong with today's generation? Why do they lack the creativity that is so important? Has the TV reduced us to robots, incapable of free thought, just to do mechanical processes over and over again?

So, it is my mission, to re-install imagination into the minds of our youths. Wish me luck.