People are always talking 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 have been very pleased to be regarded
as something so interesting as a problem. For one thing, being a problem gives
you a certain identity, and that is one of the things the young are busily
engaged in seeking.#
I find young people exciting. They have an air of freedom, and they have not a
dreary commitment to mean ambitions or love of comfort. They are not anxious
social climbers, and they have no devotion to material things. All this seems
to me to link them with life, and the origins 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, presumptuous or fatuous, but I do not turn for
protection to dreary cliches about respect of 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.&