Young People
As befits one who has achieved the unwelcome distinction of being a "senior citizen" (having turned sixty-five in 2018), I take a dim view of the current generation of young people. I say this with full awareness that I once was a young person myself. I can well remember all the foolishness, all the awkwardness, and all the mistakes that are unavoidable elements of youth, and I blush at the thought of my own youthful follies, but what I observe in young people now is much worse, and far more alarming. To my old eyes, it seems that everyone below a certain age belongs to a doltish breed from another planet. A bleak planet on which everything that I have ever experienced, and everything that I have ever believed, is of no significance whatsoever.
When I was sixteen, in the 1960s, I was in the streets, protesting against the war in Vietnam. I questioned everything that was being forced upon me at school. I was determined not to be trapped by the conformity, compromise, and compliance that I saw all around me. I wanted my life to be something other, something more, than merely a closed pattern of mindless strictures: more than a life of earning and spending money, more than a life of fitting in with everyone else. I was not satisfied to be only what those in authority wanted me to be. Although I do understand that conditions change from decade to decade, the many changes that I have seen in young people during the past fifty years are profoundly distressing to me.
Looking at members of the younger generation in the 21st century (as one who has no children of his own), I see little that offers any degree of hope. Their values are shallow, their outlook is self-centered, and their opinions are ill-founded. They display no interest in, or indeed any knowledge of, anything that happened before their lifetimes. They appear to be mainly concerned with recklessly overusing their credit cards, and gazing, as if under hypnosis, at the screens of their handheld devices. Why do they not ask necessary questions? Why are they so easily deluded and so easily controlled? Where are their stalwart acts of principled rebellion? Where is their forthright opposition to war, greed, and poverty?
Could it be that my scornful view of young people is unduly harsh? Actually, I think not. If anything, I suspect that I am being overly kind in my sour appraisal of their undeniable shortcomings, mostly because, as an older person, I lack an opportunity to see them at their worst. However, I will add that, in all fairness, the young people of today are what their elders have raised them to be. They are the inevitable result of a capitalist mentality that blithely pretends to follow a broad set of liberal standards, while regularly elevating a framework of brutal avarice above every human concern. They are living evidence of the brazen hypocrisy that defines the families and the institutions by whose false doctrines they were formed and trained.
When I was sixteen, in the 1960s, I was in the streets, protesting against the war in Vietnam. I questioned everything that was being forced upon me at school. I was determined not to be trapped by the conformity, compromise, and compliance that I saw all around me. I wanted my life to be something other, something more, than merely a closed pattern of mindless strictures: more than a life of earning and spending money, more than a life of fitting in with everyone else. I was not satisfied to be only what those in authority wanted me to be. Although I do understand that conditions change from decade to decade, the many changes that I have seen in young people during the past fifty years are profoundly distressing to me.
Looking at members of the younger generation in the 21st century (as one who has no children of his own), I see little that offers any degree of hope. Their values are shallow, their outlook is self-centered, and their opinions are ill-founded. They display no interest in, or indeed any knowledge of, anything that happened before their lifetimes. They appear to be mainly concerned with recklessly overusing their credit cards, and gazing, as if under hypnosis, at the screens of their handheld devices. Why do they not ask necessary questions? Why are they so easily deluded and so easily controlled? Where are their stalwart acts of principled rebellion? Where is their forthright opposition to war, greed, and poverty?
Could it be that my scornful view of young people is unduly harsh? Actually, I think not. If anything, I suspect that I am being overly kind in my sour appraisal of their undeniable shortcomings, mostly because, as an older person, I lack an opportunity to see them at their worst. However, I will add that, in all fairness, the young people of today are what their elders have raised them to be. They are the inevitable result of a capitalist mentality that blithely pretends to follow a broad set of liberal standards, while regularly elevating a framework of brutal avarice above every human concern. They are living evidence of the brazen hypocrisy that defines the families and the institutions by whose false doctrines they were formed and trained.