Criticism of youth - a rite of passage

1. is a blatant invitation to partake in satanic rituals;
2. causes young people to commit suicide; or
3. both 1 and 2.

Young people’s brains have been frazzled by, or their moral compass has been sent haywire by, in chronological order:

• black music;
• television;
• punk music;
• television;
• heavy metal music;
• heavy metal music played backwards;
• video games;
• television;
• the Internet;
• mobile phones;
• television.

What has been most remarkable about the last 40 years is how unaffected young people are by this onslaught of criticism. Because their world is occupied, like the rest of us, with making sense of their day to day lives. And the constant criticism acts like a kind of rite of passage to adulthood: being a young person means getting blamed. It goes with the territory.

For what it’s worth, I think that the current youth generation provides us with cause for great optimism. Consider the following:

The current youth generation collectively are by far the greatest users of text to communicate in human history.

The current youth generation communicate individually and collectively with more people than any previous generation.

Unlike their parents or grandparents they have an entirely open and flexible attitude to technology. This causes them to see the world differently. Whereas a baby boomer could see technology as a threat, a young person sees opportunity. They intuitively ask different questions.

For example, not “how do I do this?” but “how best can I use this, what are the possibilities I can explore?” Not “is my texting grammatically correct?” but “what do I want to say?” Not “I need to allocate time to contemplate this” but “what are the synergies and links between information that I am accessing from a number of sources?”

One of the more interesting experiences of my adolescence was sitting with my father watching a television broadcast of a Bob Dylan concert. At the conclusion he said something like, “You call that singing?”

He didn’t get it. And nothing that I said or did would ever make him get it. Dylan, and my musical experience, was beyond his comprehension. For many adults it is not just the past that is a foreign country. The country of young people is also foreign and strange and menacing.

So rather than denigrate, let’s celebrate young people.

Let’s encourage them to continue communicating.

And if it’s true, as the well known philosophical collective Mike and the Mechanics have argued, that “every generation blames the one before”, let’s remember that the corollary of this truism is that every generation is suspicious of, fearful for, and feels threatened by the one that follows.