People are always taking about 'the problem of youth', If there is one -which I take leave to doubt-then it is older people who create it, not the young themselves. Let us get down to fundamentals and agree that the young are after all human beings-people just like their elders. There is only one difference between an old man and a young one: the young man has a glorious future before him and the old one has a splendid future behind him: and maybe that is where the rub is.
When I was a teenager, I felt that I was just young and uncertain-that I was a new boy in a huge school, and I would hava been very pleased to be regarded as somthing so interesting as a problem, For one thing, being a problem gives you a certain indentiy, and that is one of things the young are busily engaged in seeking.
I find young peole exciting. They hava an air of freedom, and they hava no dreary commintment to mean ambitions or love of comfort. They are not anxious scocial climbers,and they hava no devotion to material things. All this seems to me to link them with life, and the origions of things. It's as if they were, in some sense, cosmic beings in violent and lovely contrast with us suburban creatures.All that is in my mind when I meet a young person. He may be conceited , ill-mannered, presumpitous or fatuous, but I do not turn for protection to dreary cliches about respect for elders-as if mere age were a reason for respect. I accept that we are equals, and I will argue with him, as an equal, if I think he is wrong.
When I was a teenager, I felt that I was just young and uncertain-that I was a new boy in a huge school, and I would hava been very pleased to be regarded as somthing so interesting as a problem, For one thing, being a problem gives you a certain indentiy, and that is one of things the young are busily engaged in seeking.
I find young peole exciting. They hava an air of freedom, and they hava no dreary commintment to mean ambitions or love of comfort. They are not anxious scocial climbers,and they hava no devotion to material things. All this seems to me to link them with life, and the origions of things. It's as if they were, in some sense, cosmic beings in violent and lovely contrast with us suburban creatures.All that is in my mind when I meet a young person. He may be conceited , ill-mannered, presumpitous or fatuous, but I do not turn for protection to dreary cliches about respect for elders-as if mere age were a reason for respect. I accept that we are equals, and I will argue with him, as an equal, if I think he is wrong.