by Emily Mcbride

Created on: January 13, 2009

Oh, Young People These Days.... Or Will They Surprise Us?

The Youth of Today are many things: informed and ignorant, clever and stupid, television dependent and computer literate, ready and unready for the challenges of tomorrow. The Challenges of tomorrow are likewise many things: political (and really, those are the challenges of every day, not of the future) economic, environmental, social, personal and so on. The current generation, like that of their parents and grandparents who often consider them unready for the future, will have to meet the challenges as they come, and will either succeed or fail. Sometimes they will succeed or fail because of their own abilities and actions, and sometimes they will be lucky or unlucky due to circumstances outside their control. In this they are exactly like all previous generations.

The usual arguments against the youth of today is that they are lazy, spoiled, uninformed, never leave home, watch too much television, don't read enough, dress like rebels or sluts, and are disrespectful to their elders. There is some aspect of truth to all of these assertions, just as there are some reasons and historical precedents behind all of them. It is also true, as Roald Dahl succinctly puts it in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, that "a child can't spoil herself you know." Parents can't be handed the blame for everything their child does wrong, but unless you believe that the current generation is inherently bad, youth generally behave the way they do because it is tolerated that they behave that way. Young people who haven't the time or patience to listen to their grandfather's rambling stories, or who dislike sharing their personal space or possessions, are very likely the same young people whose parents believe that their child must have his or her own room, and allows them to have a television in it so that even which program they want to watch is entirely a matter of choice and never of compromise.

It seems likely that the challenges of tomorrow will be great, possibly greater than the ones the parent generation had to face, and the same youth who seem to show so little potential or motivation in easier times will face a choice: sink or swim. In the event of some situations, we are unprepared. Most of the youth of today could not turn around and be farmers tomorrow, but necessity will breed changes. The grandparents of some of the current youth lived sparingly through the great depression, because they had to, not because they wanted to. Today's youth will discover that they cannot rely on their parents if the economic crisis leaves their parents struggling as much as they themselves. The worsening fallout of the environmental crisis will require them to take charge of climate change initiatives. A simple lack of money will eventually cure them, at least in part, of the disaster that is rampant consumerism. Whether all of these things will be enough, or whether circumstances of the new world will be too much for individuals and groups we have no way of knowing, but the youth of today will face those challenges and circumstances, like every previous generation has, because they have to.

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