Kids these days

Chapter one of the GOM 101 text book is titled “The Good Old Days”.  It points to glorious times in years gone by and provides fuel for grumpy old men everywhere to bemoan the lamentable state of the world today, harking back to a time when life was simpler, happiness was a more abundant commodity and politicians were much better at fiddling their expenses.

The second chapter, “Kids These Days”, somewhat controversially flips the theme from the first chapter on its proverbial head and reminds us that young people today don’t know how lucky they are.  Clearly things are better for them than they were for us.  The definition of ‘kids’ is quite broad.  In the world of a GOM, qualification is granted to a younger sibling of one of your mates, or anyone that harbours an opposing view who has a less faded birth certificate.

Unbelievably, there are Millennials today that are taking their first tentative steps on the GOM ladder, who have realised that it’s no longer all about them; Generation Z is stealing their thunder.  They, and the Generation Zedders, should shut their mouths; they’re all too young to know any better.

Despite living in ‘The Good Old Days’, GOM training dictates that we must pronounce upon the hardships we faced.  According to the text book, we wore clothing made from hessian sacks and had to walk fifteen miles to school, backward through the snow, with bare feet.  The stock phrase to use at this point is that “Kids these days have no idea how lucky they are,” with the rejoinder that not only did we experience deprivation, but school days were much longer; we started lessons at 6am, had no lunch break, and left school at 6pm before cleaning 15 chimneys on the way home to pay for the gruel that would be slopped into the enamel plates that also served as our bed pans.

We must pretend that we didn’t have a trouble free, safe and carefree environment in which to live, where the greatest concern was whether the sun would continue to shine when the holidays ended, and we’d have to suffer in a hot classroom.  Of course, if we complained about that, or inadvertently removed a fingernail using the belt sander during Woodwork, there was the danger that our teachers would take a bamboo cane to our hides, but we’ll suggest it toughened us up.

It’s not the same for kids these days.  Some would argue that their biggest concern is having to keep abreast of the latest acronym, but, WTF, is it really?  In my day, we knew our place, which although most of us didn’t know it at the time, was to grow up and not challenge the status quo, because life was pretty good.  So, it has come as something of a surprise to the GOM generation to acknowledge that we have been, and continue to be, a bunch of tossers by maintaining the belief that we should keep things as they were, because things were so much better way back when.

I mean, really, what do kids these days know?  What could Malala Yousafzai possibly teach us with her advocacy for girls’ education and women's equality?  Subjects that were so threatening and challenging to the Taliban regime’s oppression and misogyny, that they would choose to shoot the 15-year-old Malala?  Clearly, she’d have been much better off keeping her mouth shut to human rights abuses and be much safer by ignoring the 130 million girls out of school today or the injustice faced my millions of women around the world.  It might not have got her shot.

And whilst we’re on the subject of shooting, what do the children of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School know about gun violence?   Seventeen of their peers were gunned down in an unprovoked attack by a former student, earning the “Thoughts and Prayers” refrain from mostly GOM politicians.  Why, when we live in a society that enables a 19-year-old to legally purchase a semi-automatic rifle, would we want to sit up and listen to the students and the 1.2 million they inspired with the March For Our Lives (MFOL) movement, rather than the NRA who espouse gun ownership as a means to make society safer and their advocates wealthier?

Back in Britain, why should we bother trying to find a solution to the US gun-crime epidemic?  After all, our kids aren’t wielding guns – they’re too busy carrying knives in increasing numbers in their misguided attempts to keep themselves safe; often becoming victims of knife crime when the very weapon they’re holding is used against them.  On Thursday, the BBC reported that there were 732 killings involving knives in 2018, up 12% from the year before, with 20% of knife crime perpetrators under the age of 18.  As well intentioned and intelligent adults, our political elite have been spectacularly unsuccessful in developing a solution to the problem.  Maybe we should ask the kids.

Alternatively, the youth of today should perhaps find something better to do, like go to university, a place that was largely free to the GOMs of today and which is still affordable to anyone willing to take on the mantle of £15,000 per annum of debt that grows at a rate of 6% per annum from the day they begin their studies and which they will be saddled with for only the first 30 years after they graduate, as they futilely try to repay the average loan of £50,000 they rack up during their Bachelors degree.

Of course, that assumes that they’re from a background where they have that opportunity, where they have parents that actively encourage them to further their education rather than parents who are spending their time queuing for one of the 1.6 million emergency food parcels that were given out across the Trussell Trust’s UK food bank network last year – nearly a third of which went to children.  How fortunate we are that, here in the UK, we have such a great social security system; without it, think how much greater the 19% increase in annual food aid distribution would have been.  What’s even more troubling is that those numbers largely exclude the meals served from volunteer soup kitchens to the nearly 5,000 people that sleep rough every night in the UK.

A lot of GOMs attribute the surge in homelessness to a breakdown in the societal values that they hold so dearly and are quick to decry the absence of moral values in teenagers today.  I did a Google search using “moral values of teenagers”.  The first page of search results provided plenty of material evidencing the decline of ethical standards in our youth and other articles exercised the literary equivalent of hand-ringing at the deplorable sense of right and wrong that teenagers demonstrate.  It wasn’t until I got to the second page of results that I found an article from the Irish Times that, to my mind, pointed to the underlying cause – us!

“… teenagers are influenced by the double standards that are widely accepted in our society. If a child's parents do not respect or blatantly reject traditional moral values, the child is likely to do the same.”

Perhaps we should exercise a little less outrage and adopt a shade more support for the actions of children such as Greta Thunberg, who displays higher values and moral courage than most with the 'School strike for climate' movement that she inspired.  Not enough of us are hearing or acting on what she and others are telling us and that’s not just the climate change sceptics.  She’s calling upon all of us to fulfil an obligation to leave our environment in a fit(ter) state for future generations.

Sure, we can point to the good old days when life was better than it is today, but we cannot do so without taking a significant degree of responsibility for the parlous state in which we find our society and environment.  It doesn’t make me particularly proud to be a member of the GOM tribe.  We’ve manufactured a crisis and stewarded closeted communities of which we should be ashamed.

When we try to tell our kids how great things were or how good they have things, we should remember that they’re going to be the first generation in the industrial world that will be worse off than their parents; that the legacy we’re leaving them is a pile of shite and that perhaps, when they tell us to STFU because we’ve messed up their lives, we should acknowledge that they may just have a point.

Twitter: @GOMinTraining
Copyright © Craig Brown, 2019
27 April 2019