A friend, not born in that year, as it happens, recently remarked that the best year ever to have been born was 1946. You missed the war, but you got rock and roll; you got the pill but you missed AIDS. You got more than sex and drugs and rock and roll, though. You got everything. You got the earth and everything on it, all its bounty ‘yea, unto the seventh generation.’
Compare the Baby Boomer generation with the post Generation X’ers; those born in the 90s. Their prospects of ever getting on the unfortunately named ‘housing ladder’ seem vanishingly remote, which is particularly tough in a society that has abandoned manufacturing and increasingly returned to an Ancien Regime form of ‘rentier’ economy.
Increasing numbers are finding, after being told that this is all that matters, that there are simply not enough university places for them to get into, and if they do they will be saddled with debt for years thereafter, which will make it harder for them to save the deposit on a house, and therefore acquire the only entry ticket to full membership of society that seems to matter these days. I haven’t even mentioned the prospects of the underclass.
On top of it all this is the generation, educated, in this country a least, in a society largely shaped by the assumption of the primacy of what are quaintly – though wrongly - called free market values (a theme this blog shall return to frequently). This generation, more than any other, has been brought up in a world of conscience free consumerism, where it isn’t necessary to know if milk comes from a cow, or that once upon a time when things went wrong it was often actually possible to repair them. This is going to make it especially tough for them once they are confronted with the big truth – the party’s over.
In Galapagos Kurt Vonnegut foretold of a future in which a final generation of the young turned their backs on the remainder of society as people who had failed them. Their Nihilism defined them. I see them all around.
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