“Kids these days!”
I’ve lost count of how many times one of my fellow Boomers has made that proclamation, often aimed at a young person’s behavior or attitude. I often want to agree with them but stop myself knowing that I prompted similar statements from older people when I was young.
In 1973, while hitchhiking around Europe, my hippie friends and I found ourselves in Vienna. We had just bought some sandwiches and decided to eat on a lawn outside St. Stephen’s Cathedral. We ignored the sign saying Keep Off the Grass, stepped over the low fence, and plopped our bell-bottomed selves down. Oh, the looks and tsk-tsks we got from the elderly Viennese matrons who witnessed our transgression. I’m sure we thought it ridiculous to not be able to sit on the grass, and that the rule was stupid and unreasonable.
This attitude of the young has a long history. In the 4th century BCE, it was noted by Aristotle when he wrote this concerning youth: “They think they know everything and are always quite sure about it.” (Rhetoric, Book II, Chapter 12.)
It’s important for us, as elders, to remember that what we observe about the generations behind us, our elders also observed about us. The situations and forms may have changed, but the behaviors and attitudes haven’t.
I live in a senior housing complex, and often when sitting with other residents, one of them will get going on how “in our day things were better,” or “things like that didn’t happen” when discussing popular culture or the news. I manage to hold my tongue, but how I want to respond is by saying things weren’t better in our day. They were different, perhaps, but not better in the sense of higher quality or more appropriate. Music wasn’t better, nor motion pictures or, for that matter, politics.
Perhaps why we think this is because we aren’t engaging fully enough with contemporary trends and culture. With limited exposure to what is currently popular we don’t understand the appeal it has to younger people. Also, we now live in a multicultural society with a diversity of offerings in pop culture and the arts.
Don’t live in the past. And, as the late Ram Dass wrote, “Be here now!”
If we wish to have the respect of younger generations, we must quit kvetching about them so that we, to them, don’t become stereotypical “Old People.”
As elders, we have much wisdom and experience to impart to others, but to facilitate being seen and heard by them, we need to live gracefully and act with dignity no matter our circumstances. It is then that the young will take notice of us and want to learn from us.
In our American culture, respect for elders is not universal, despite all religious and spiritual traditions teaching this. In the Hebrew book of Exodus is the commandment to, “Honor your father and mother,” and in Leviticus we are instructed to “Rise before the aged and defer to the old.” Confucius taught extensively about filial piety and how moral development is facilitated by learning from the wisdom and experience of elders.
If we want to continue to have influence in our families, a voice in our communities, and in general, the ability to affect change, we must learn to listen to younger people and not judge them for expressing themselves differently or having opinions and beliefs that, on the surface, conflict with our own. When young people feel they are being dismissed, they adopt the attitude: “They’re old, they don’t understand.”
In the interest of bridging the generation gap, it is necessary for us to find common ground. We have more similarities than differences. For instance, we jointly hold the fate of this planet in our hands. Together, we must defend democracy. In short, it is imperative that no matter our age or generation, we must care for one another.
That day in Vienna, a security guard was eventually called to make us get off the grass. These many years later, I wonder if we would have gotten up on our own if one of the women had simply walked over and said, “Hello.”
Stephen Sinclair holds a Master of Divinity from Meadville Lombard Theological School in Chicago and is an ordained Unitarian Universalist minister. He’s been a pastor and chaplain at a number of churches and hospitals in the U.S. and has worked with the homeless. He lives on Capitol Hill in Seattle.