; )
Generation spite: is that really how we want our kids to remember us?
Wanting to leave a better world for future generations is a basic desire. Our struggles ought to be final, our political and social battles won, in order that our children will not have to fight them again. And yet the year 2017 sees both them and us agreed on one thing: the
next generation will be worse off than their parents.
Our political decisions seem designed to punish the young. Yet when young people call us on it, we turn on them with spite and malice: “
Grow up, snowflakes! What you need is a good war. We never had your advantages – it never did us any harm.” Of course, to believe that last one you have to believe that people attacking their own children for wanting a better life is something that healthy and undamaged people do.
The
precariat class swells, year on year, and it’s young people who make up the bulk of it. Jobs that would have been considered solid a decade ago are now looked down on as mere stepping stones to “real” work. Cleaning,
driving, even selling goods to other people are regarded as “unreal work” that you shouldn’t expect to pay well or even at all. These jobs are there for you to learn “job skills”: show up 15 minutes before they start paying you, don’t mention pesky rights such as safety or discrimination. Play ball and maybe one day you can get one of the ever decreasing stock of “real” jobs.
There used to be a material underpinning to the Protestant work ethic. Labour was how you obtained the means to survive, so the virtues of hard work and discipline were important because they would enable you to obtain these means. Now, work is the end in itself, a performance rather than a contract. Wages are a luxury, and the idea that they should be
high enough to live on, let alone save for the future, is apparently hopelessly unrealistic socialism.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/apr/21/generation-spite-kids-scapegoat-young-people
