The Young

[logovo]

At a weekend dinner party at our home I had to bite my tongue at some typical complaining about The Young. The Young are so uninformed! The Young don't read! The Young are dreadful, with their Twitter and Facebooking! Then they really got into it.

I know that we sometimes like feeling fearful/superior of/to a group of some kind, but The Young is such a funny one to me, it's impossible to connect on any level to people having the vapors over "kids these days".

One of my sharpest memories of being a 24 year old is of sitting down with a college friend, who started his conversation by saying how music had turned terrible, and how music during our college years was so much better. "Now that was real music!" he said. It was like he was in training for middle age dinner parties. He would have fitted right in during mine.

Comments

[vito_excalibur]

I can't even deal with people having vapors over The Young! It's like, do they not remember? Are they not aware that every SINGLE generation has gone through this? I mean, I worry about The Young now, because I will have to help at least one of them through it, and the world is so different now that I doubt my ability? But then every generation since like the 1850s has gone through that too, and we make it through somehow!

[logovo]

It's specially weird to see that in people who themselves aren't that old. I don't know if it's resentment or just an inborn tendency towards fuddy-duddiness. Thinking about my college and high school years, I very clearly remember a kind of a conservative groupthink that I use to attribute to time and place, not to people generally being like that everywhere, in every era.

I wish I could have that Socrates quote memorized, the one where he complains about the young, or another one that I have even a fuzzier memory off, from the late 1800s, about kids those days not reading. Heh.