The generation gap The pros and cons

Anthony Burgess, an Englishman, whose A Clockwork Orange (both the book and the film based on it) had gained swift popularity among young people, was interviewed by a student. The following is a  sample of what he had to say, pertinent to the generation gap.

Q.  Are children different today from those when you were growing up?

A. I don’t think we were much different… The difference lay in the fact that we were not appealed to, catered, or exploited as a separate section of society. It is important to remember that this image of youth as a separate entity is not the world of you (young) people but of older people who want to make money. 

Therefore, when I was young we didn’t dress differently from our elders. We didn’t speak a different language. We had different ideas. But we knew that sooner or later we’d be absorbed into the bigger adult world, and didn’t cut ourselves off from it.

Margaret Mead sees youth’s alienation that is responsible for the gap, as not so much a matter of youth cutting itself off as being cut off by an adult society that imposes on the young “a delayed childhood”. In earlier days, the young were ‘hurried into adulthood through an early work experience and early marriage’ while today ‘the years of childhood are stretched out… to in clued the years of adolescence’ and during this artificially prolonged period of dependence, all their independence is ‘more apparent than real’.

Nearly always when this gap is being discussed, there are some who claim that the gap between generations is not wider that the  gap within generations. No generation is monochrome, they say. Each has its internal tensions, conflicts and extreme polarizations that tear it apart. Youth also subscribes to this view. “Some young people are born old”, complained a youth leader. “They’re every bit as narrow, reactionary and set in their ways as the worst among older folk. And there’s no changing them!”

Yet, the moment one speaks of the gap, one knows it is with direct reference to the gap between generations. It is unrealistic to dismiss this gap or to minimize it, and dangerous to take it for granted until a crisis or difficult situation occurs. The thing about the gap is that it is at once more than one kind of gap—a communication gap, a credibility gap and a cultural divide.

The Communication Gap   

Youth seems to be evolving its own language, with the intention of rendering itself incommunicado. There may not be much evidence of linguistic differences in this country but in other societies, exasperated elders complain of the difficulty they have in “getting through” to young people. “It is not only that they use different words”, said a parent, “but they use the same words differently”. However, the communication gap is widening more because of a lack of common ground. 

“Youth question everything—values, standards, customs, and hold nothing sacred anymore. While on the other hand they won’t answer our questions, when we try to find out what they’re up to, or they give evasive answers if they answer at all. Haven’t we a right to know? “ A common charge aimed against youth, irrationally enough, is inexperience.

The Credibility Gap

This rift shows that neither trusts the other’s judgement and decisions, nor acknowledges what right each has to make them “Older people”, said a critic, “point out all the opportunities and advantages that they have given us. Yet  they will not admit that because of these very things, they now have a great deal to learn from us, and knowledge that must be applied to real-life situations. 

We can’t accept their judgments at face value, that they know what’s good for us, because we see that even when they urge us to do the right kind of thing, they go about it in the wrong way”.

So much of the gap is the result of circumstances beyond anyone’s control today, with the onslaught of change that throws older people, especially, off balance. Youth, as a product of these times, can take radically changed situations more easily in its stride, simply because these situations are the only ones they know and are familiar with, having no memory of other days. 

On both sides, this gap is painful.

Youth culture is being commercialized by those who see big money in exploiting youth trends, whether these are youth-generated or not; fashions, song, dance, gadgets and typical haunts of youth such as discotheques, and the rest.

Parents in this country, despite the grave anxieties they express seem to take a secret pride in seeing their young so “with it”. Youth in the West, as often as not, earns what it spends, doing what would be regarded in this country (by old and young alike) as all kinds of ‘menial’ jobs. “What worries young people”,  said one earnest young person, “is that our youth is shortlived.

 Our ideals and enthusiasm die an early death, once hard necessities dictate that we become new cogs in the wheel to replace the old cogs who’ve done their day”.