I am a representative of the young generation. Youth is the most beautiful and colorful time in any person’s life, but it is also the time when people pave the way for their future. So it is quite natural that from time to time we just stop doing some enjoyable things and start reflecting on serious problems. I am a critical person, who thinks a lot …. Problems of youth are very actual for me, so for my essay I have chosen the notion of patriotism as applied to the youth generation.

What is patriotism? I understand this value as a feeling of a person’s responsibility for his country. It is a person’s high quality attitude to the nation’s and the country’s historic values, a feeling of pride for it, or pain and sorrow for its failures. To say whether a person is a patriot or not, we should consider not his words, but deeds. He who is a patriot respects his birth place and Motherland, loves and cares about the native land, regards the local values, is loyal to his country and is ready to give his life for it. He also respects his family, is tolerant to his countrymen, aspires to help them and realizes this desire in concrete actions which bring to the changes for the best in the country. To sum up my definition of this value, I would also say that patriotism is none other than state of soul of a person who really thinks about his Motherland and tries to make it successful.

I held out a bit of research about youth’s being patriotic in different historic periods of our country. To investigate that, I interviewed my grandmother and dad. First of all, I asked my granny Saniya to tell me how they lived when she was a young. From answers to my questions I knew that her youth had fallen on the difficult for the country period of World War II. All the men and young boys from the village went to the front, and the women and children had to do all the work about the house and in the collective farm.

My granny Saniya was ten years old at that time, but her young age did not prevent from doing the work equally with the grown-ups. Together with them, she mowed grass for hay, weeded fields by hand, often even spending nights in the open air. The post-war period was not the easier time, it was necessary to bring the country to the order after the destructive war. With a group of youth, Saniya was sent to the Chelyabinsk region as a timber-floater. They had to work hard, having a piece of bread with a lump of butter for the whole day, to spend nights outdoors, to wash in the river. At the age of eighteen, Saniya, together with other young people, built a railway which was to connect industrially important places of Bashkortostan. She worked during daylight hours, and at night she sewed dresses for the girls who worked together with her. That was a very difficult time, but the youth tried to find time for fun and amusements. In the evening they played games, danced and sang songs to the accordion. They staged outdoor concerts to make the people forget about life problems if only for some time.

I found this life story of my grandmother very interesting and rather informative for me to make some conclusions related to the topic of my essay, but I thought I should interview some younger person to see the whole picture. So I talked with my dad who is also not very young (he is fifty), but represents the generation other than the one of my grannies.

 My father’s name is Fanis, and I am proud of him, because he has always been very active and optimistic. When I asked him questions about young people pastime and social activity, dad told me that after college he had been elected a secretary (leader) of the Komsomol (Young Communist League) organization in the Miyaki region, his native place. The group comprised more than a hundred young boys and girls. They organized different concerts, competitions on chess, tennis and billiards. There were Komsomol meetings, where they discussed the ways to improve life in the village. If members of the organization succeeded in some field, they got some awards and presents. Dad said that they, the youth, didn’t waste time: apart from studies at school and taking part in sports competitions, they helped their parents in the collective farm. Dad also mentioned that members of pioneer and komsomol organizations took part in the activity of groups called "Timur’s team”. The main point of this activity was to help lonely elderly people of the village. Dad explained me that the girls did some work about the house: washing the floors or laundering, and the boys chopped firewood, fetched water from draw wells, or cleaned paths from snow in winter. And they did that not for money or for some other benefit, but for only "thank you”!

Listening to my relatives’ stories, I wondered what motive force was behind them; in other words, what they were guided by at that time. Why could my grannies overcome such difficulties and didn’t lose courage, optimism and will for life? They were very young girls, but they dragged all the works off. When I asked my interviewees about that, my grannies answered that they had worked only for their country, they had tried to make their collective farm the best, and my dad said that they had worked hard because the komsomol organization called for it. I understood that it was patriotism that guided my grannies over all hardships. And can we say that patriotism is inherent in the present day young generation? Could we, today’s youth, do what the older generation had done when they were young?

History proves that people mainly manifest a surge of patriotism as a national value at critical times for the country: wars, social conflicts, revolutions, national or natural calamities. At such moments, patriotism shows itself in noble impulses and deeds, heroic sacrifice for motherland. But I am sure that an ability of a person to act as a patriot should be brought up by his family and the society from early childhood. The present day younger generation of Russia began their life in rather specific economic and social conditions. They do have a right to live a worthy life: to be healthy, have children, rest, have a job. At the time of my grannies’ youth, there was a lot of work, and they did it with enthusiasm, because they had to save the country and then reconstruct it. When my dad was young, the state guaranteed every young person a job after getting education at colleges and institutes. Youth was regarded as an active and good working force. But nowadays, the situation is rather difficult for youth. Not every young person can enter the wanted educational institution, because education costs a lot of money now. But a number of young people can’t find a job even after getting higher education. I think that it is one of the main reasons why youth are not so patriotic today. Youth lose their interest in it. There are so many problems in the world and in the country, the most serious of which are the economical crisis and unemployment among youth… Seeing no way out of these difficulties, youth lose hope for the bright future and think that the state doesn’t try to decide existing problems. That’s why youth for the most part relate to politics in a negative or passive form.