There is a generational war in every generation, because the old guard and their old ideas must 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 we 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 But we are, of course, completely wrong and out of date and must be pushed aside to make way for the next generation,n who have quite different (although equally wrong) ideas about how the world should be run and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.”
People of my age didn’t stand a chance of winning our own particular generational war. Pushing up behind us was the so-called “greatest generation” of war leaders and heroes, and 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, the dull post-war pre-boomers, were overwhelmed and quickly written out of history.
The Covid epidemic gave a new spin to the generational wheel of misfortune. Young people were confronted with an almost unprecedented upheaval in their lives, and all the restrictions and changes were coming from above, from those same old people who were so despised, out of date, out of touch, and – let’s face it – boring. The effect was to put the brake on young lives just when they should have been accelerating to maximum speed. Education, sociability, sports, love, and sex were all put on hold. It’s hard to imagine anything more frustrating.
Generational conflict is as old as history. Long before Covid there was widespread resentment about the gigantic national debt which was and is loaded on to the shoulders of future generations. Politicians now vow to reduce the debt, which guarantees that it will get much bigger.
The newest generation has its own complaints and challenges - artificial intelligence threatens their expectation of meaningful work and career, corrupt social media, economic decline, geriatric leaders, and political chaos worldwide offer a bleak prospect. Meanwhile, their ageing parents and grandparents are sitting on untold billions in money and real estate, so that many young people cannot afford a place to live.
In 200,7 Christopher Buckley, who has given us a number of sharp political satires, published a novel called Boomsday that predicted the next inter-generational war. In the story, which of course is pure satire, an angry young blogger suggests that the unproductive and expensive Baby Boomers should be persuaded to make a graceful exit at the age of seventy. In the novel, though not in real life, 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 just wait, and we’ll see what happens.
