There is a generational war at least once in every generation, because the old guard and its old ideas have to be replaced. That’s how we move ahead, and that’s one difference between human beings and animals. In the animal kingdom there are very few changes over the years or centuries. They follow the immemorial habits of their species. Humans are different. Older people like me imagine that they know how the world should be run and how civilized people should behave. But we are, of course, completely wrong and out of date and must be pushed aside to make way for the next generation who have quite different (although equally mistaken) ideas about how the world should be run and how civilized people should behave. This process of exchanging one set of illusions for another is known, not without irony, as “progress.”
My own generation didn’t stand a chance in our particular generational war. We were just beginning to get our young lives in focus after 1945 when the Baby Boomers came thundering in to obliterate us – an enormous cohort of eager kids who immediately started inventing things we had never heard of like long hair and sex and rock and roll and political protest. We dull pre-boomers were overwhelmed and quickly written out of history.
The COVID epidemic has given a new spin to the generational wheel of fortune. Young people are confronted with an almost unprecedented upheaval in their lives, and all the restrictions and changes are coming from above, from those same old people who are so despised, out of date, out of touch and – let’s face it – boring. The effect has been to put a brake on young lives just when they should be accelerating to maximum speed. Education sociability, sports, love, and sex have all been put on hold. It’s hard to imagine anything more frustrating, and the cracks are beginning to show. Already we’ve seen riotous gatherings and threatening fireworks in the night, unruly unmasked assemblies in bars, city streets and on beaches. On my daily walks I’ve noticed that, in contrast to the middle aged and elderly, virtually no young people are wearing masks. It’s a quiet rebellion by one generation against another. The thought is quite literally in the air that there’s no point in protecting senior citizens, and young people might be better off without them. Youngsters aren’t afraid of death, because they scarcely believe in it. The great eighteenth century essayist William Hazlitt wrote a famous piece on “The Feeling of Immortality in Youth,” which is as true now as it was then. “No young man believes he shall ever die,” he wrote, which may be an exaggeration but certainly captures an essential truth. Risky activities just don’t seem risky when you are young and feel invulnerable, and it’s obvious that masks and social distancing seem oppressive and ridiculous to most teenagers.
Generational conflict is as old as history. Even before COVID came along there was widespread resentment about the gigantic national debt which was and is being loaded on to the shoulders of future generations. Now the debt will be much, much bigger. They certainly have something to be upset about.
A few years ago Christopher Buckley published a novel called Boomsday that predicted the next intergenerational war. In the story – which of course is pure satire – an angry young blogger suggested that the unproductive and expensive Baby Boomers should be given incentives to make a graceful exist at the age of 70. The proposal caught fire on the internet, and inspired angry demonstrations at golf courses, retirement communities, pharmacies, and other places sacred to the elderly. If you want to find out how the story ends you can get the book from the library, or you can just wait.
Copyright: David Bouchier
