Here I am, spending another evening waiting for my older sons to return from their wonderful party at Louise Gallery, a fashionable club in Brussels. We had the usual discussion before they left, about the curfew time and their intention to stay for the night at some friends’.

Sometime I feel like I am from another planet, but when I look at the promo video from the Louise Gallery (have a look, it is at http://www.louisegallery.com/miami_vice/) I can’t help thinking this is a gross and empty representation of how fun for 16-year old girls and boys should be. All this glitter, the obstentatious luxury, the cars, the money falling from the roof, the champagne (the best marketing plot ever, if you ask me) is so vulgar that I get angry every time I see reasonably intelligent people falling for it. Just looking at the vocabulary of the ad: “luxurious, high-class, exclusive, celebrities” and seeing that they provide a (paid) limousine service with Hummers, possibly the most polluting car in the world, gives you a sense of the educational values that are passed around here.

And if it’s your children, you feel sad: because you haven’t been able to pass on not only some basic values, but not even a sense of taste, of healthy fun, of respect for oneself and your friends. Don’t misunderstand me, I am no prude nostalgic of old times: I just shiver when I see marketing dominating our lives and teenagers filling (?) their lives with expectation for something that will contribute nothing to their growth and happiness.

Of course I am not even mentioning the drinking, the smoking, and possibly worse stuff going on during those parties: if you ask me, that’s the most physically dangerous but the least long-term frightnening side of the whole nonsense. And I am not blaming our kids for this, our adult world is full of equally stupid behaviours and attitudes.

Any helpful comments out there? How do we open our children’s eyes before they get too entangled in this sub-culture that is seemingly filling every corner of our time and minds?