The name "World Youth Day" is an interesting one, isn't it?
I mean surely "World Youth Day" sounds like it should be a no-brainer.
World: indicative of the entire world or people representative of the world.
Youth: young people.
Day: 24 hours.
…and yet, it's not any of that.
I'm still struggling to get my head around how "World Youth Day" has been named. Everything about the name can be thrown away in some respect.
People aren't attending "World Youth Day". They're attending something else. Here are some of my observations over the past two days of "World Youth Day" that indicate just how bloody wrong the naming is:
World: It's not the world. It's the Catholic world. If it were "the world," then we'd be celebrating multiple religious outlooks on life and not just Catholicism.
Youth: An interesting point to make throughout all of this is how much "youth" you'll actually see on the streets of Sydney attending "World Youth Day". I would actually say that of the two-hundred-odd thousand participants apparently down here for the event, a bloody good proportion of them are over the age of 20. Shit, if you're over the age of 18, I have trouble calling you youth as it is. But I'm seeing old people… like, oldish people and middle aged people and they're using the term "youth"? Like… damn. I guess everyone is young compared to a dead guy like Jesus but still, you've got to have limits.
Day: A day is twenty-four (24) hours. Sometimes a day seems longer like if you've been on a really long flight. But a day is not a week… and yet it is here.
Catholics must have a strange calendar system. If your birthday is in a couple of weeks and World Youth Day spans a week, does it actually take you around 14 weeks in real-time (not Catholic time) to get to your birthday?
With all these word issues, what "World Youth Day" should probably be worded as is "Catholic World Multi-Generational Week".
Something tells me thought that CWMGW SYD just doesn't look as nice as WYD SYD, especially when you consider the "What Would Jesus Do" connotations found in the initials WWJD in comparison to World Youth Day's WYD.
The entire thing gets even more ridiculous if you take on the idea that a bloody good proportion of the attendees are adults existing around "youth".
I've heard frequently that the biggest selling items during World Youth Day's in other countries have been condoms and morning after pills, even though the Catholic religion isn't too fond of either. If this is the case, could the older generation just be using the younger generation to sleep with as many drunk and deluded teenagers all praying for forgiveness at the same time?
And then the other question… do I really want to know?
(Probably. I mean I am a horny bastard.)