Wednesday 17 March 2010

In Praise of Youth.

Blogging has made me slightly more optimistic about the road our culture might take in the future. I’m reading a lot of blogs written by young people in their teens and twenties, and I’m surprised by how many of them get it. They see through the lies, the hypocrisy, the greed and the manipulation that goes on. Some of them rant about it quite wonderfully on their blogs.

What concerns me is whether they will be the next generation of decision makers, or whether the decision making will continue to be vested in the hands of those who didn’t get it, but stayed comfortably in the mainstream tugging their forelocks in obeisance to the system. It also worries me that people change when they come out of education and have to earn a living. They climb onto the treadmill, because our highly organised and regulated way of life offers little by way of alternative. And the treadmill is very good at seducing people into what I can only call, for want of a better expression, the suburban mindset.

It is essentially a closed and self-deluding mindset, smug and self-congratulatory, in which any attempt to challenge the status quo is howled down as subversive. What’s more, it offers what it sees as the perfect answer to the questioning of the young: ‘We older people are wiser and more experienced than you. Issues are never black and white, but a succession of shades of grey. You’ll come to see it that way eventually.’ Often they do; it’s how student protesters become bankers and management consultants.

Wisdom permits both approaches. Seeing the shades of grey need not preclude the recognition that they are often a smoke screen, and that looking beyond it is necessary if we are to create a better world. It is perfectly proper that the idealism of youth should be informed by an increasing understanding of the complexities in society, but it doesn’t have to be blunted by it. I hope today’s generation of youth will do better in that regard than mine did.

2 comments:

Emily said...

i'm glad you're optimistic! i used to be...still am somewhat but it's diminishing. once in a while i have little meltdowns about my own complacency in the system, but eventually i realize i couldn't ever fit into the mainstream, even if i actively tried. not even if i lobotomized myself with a knitting needle.

i'm not sure what to think of my generation though. it's hard to get a read on majority attitudes--blogs are an interesting source for individual opinions, but they're anecdotal and can only hint at societal trends, not so much demonstrate them. i honestly don't know how to get an unbiased look at how things are going.

JJ said...

Hi, Em. Thanks for the comment. I might have added that I worked for a youth-oriented, inner city charity for three years. I was impressed with some of the wisdom and maturity I witnessed among 15-year-olds that was in stark contrast to to the blind, bigoted (and often racist) crap I saw in the police and city council who were forever hassling us. Maybe that will make a post one day. What are you cooking today? Mischief, I hope.