Opinion

Anita Robinson: There's always been a generation gap but the divide today seems wider than ever

<span style="color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-family: sans-serif, Arial, Verdana, &quot;Trebuchet MS&quot;; ">Youth is a brief period of ill-informed infallibility</span>
Youth is a brief period of ill-informed infallibility Youth is a brief period of ill-informed infallibility

Significant signs that one is ageing are an irritable impatience with the young – their manners, their morals, their behaviour, their self-obsession and uninformed judgementalism.

The young are foul-mouthed, irreligious and vulgar, with an unearned sense of entitlement and the attention span of a fruit-fly – all traits that provoke choleric old gentlemen and genteel elderly ladies to write to the papers, lamenting that society’s going to hell in a handcart and it was never like this in their day. This is called ‘the generation gap’ and it was ever thus. Socrates wrote just such a condemnatory diatribe in the fourth century BC.

Youth is a brief period of ill-informed infallibility. I believed that my parents, elderly when I was still in my teens, knew nothing and my mother’s sole raison d’etre was to make my life a misery. I turned my dress hems up; she let them back down. As a young teacher in my first job, I was called to the elderly principal’s office to be told my skirts were too short and it was “troubling the parish priest”. I had my first drink (half a pint of lager and lime) at nineteen and three-quarters and a virtuous stool-pigeon threatened to ring my parents. Oh, wasn’t I a wild one indeed – but by today’s standards, a pattern-card of moral rectitude.

Lord knows, nobody believes now that the ‘strict obedience, speak when spoken to, mind you p’s and q’s and show respect’ recipe for rearing was effective, but it was a sound enough apprenticeship for entering adulthood in my day. The current culture of leniency in upbringing has resulted in the balance of power shifting from parent to child, making the infant the centre of its own universe. Little discipline produces little Caesars, miniature tyrants indulged to a ridiculous degree who don’t recognise the word ‘no’, are allowed to make their own choices, take their own decisions and naively believe the world revolves around them. They must not, under any circumstances experience disappointment or danger.

Schools are complicit. All risk is taken out of play, tig and conkers banned, competition discouraged, (all have taken part, so all must have prizes.) Life isn’t like that. Talent matters, but tenacity to try again is equally important. There’s a cold day coming for modern day ‘snowflakes’. Buoyed up with empty praise and inflated expectations, they’re ill-equipped for the world they meet at third-level education, naively climbing aboard any passing ideological bandwagon.

University, once the forum for fun, free speech and intellectual coming-of-age (not necessarily in that order) is now made a ‘safe space’ from which students, fingers in their ears, ban those speakers whose informed views challenge their half-baked own. Freedom of speech, where are ye? They tear down the statues of their founders whose riches were accrued through slavery, though many were instigators of its abolition. Are we expected to revise history at the behest of those still resenting historical wrongs?

Let them turn their attention instead to rectifying modern slavery, where immigrant workers are shamelessly exploited by unscrupulous employers in every city in the British Isles.

Now they’ve focused on ‘cultural appropriation’ and the bottom has fallen out of the fancy-dress business. It started with the banning of sombreros, moved on to any kind of ethnic dressing not one’s own and the latest iteration is an onslaught upon a hapless white popstar who made the mistake of adopting an African hairstyle (Buntu buns) for a party. Front page of every tabloid it was. She was forced to apologise for her ‘thoughtlessness’. This is what we’ve come to.

Climbing on the ‘woke’ wagon last week alone were complaints about horses ‘forced to draw barges along canals’ (The barges are floating on water you dolts. The horses are merely propelling them. No sweat.) objections to able-bodied actors playing disabled roles and parents of obese children being diplomatically told, “Your child has an unhealthy body-mass index”.

Is there no end to offences waiting to be taken?