The debate tires, but always returns.
And it scares, because it gives the impression that there is no greater complacency in adulthood than gratuitous disdain for those who come below.
No matter how much time passes, you are never safe from the sterile generational war.
The last to sign up was Arturo Pérez-Reverte (70 years old), delighted to call the kids lazy from
El Hormiguero
: “We are raising generations of young people who are not prepared for when the Titanic iceberg arrives.
We have raised them overprotected, thinking that everything is solved by plugging in a phone and we have removed the defensive mechanisms,” he said, causing the expected stir on Twitter in the face of a phrase as predictable as it is tiresome and which earned a sub-tweet from the deputy of More Country, Íñigo Errejón: “They say that youth is weak.
Stand up to several crises sailing in precariousness and without being able to emancipate.
To be young today you need a lot of courage, ”he wrote, without the need for an at sign in the mention.
"Young people are not prepared for the Titanic iceberg" - @perezreverte #ReverteEH pic.twitter.com/NDsGZObtyd
– The Anthill (@El_Hormiguero) October 18, 2022
Now it may be time to scold the writer who boasts of longing for women like those of before, but he was also preceded in this absurdity by the journalist Antonio Navalón, who called those of us who were born in the eighties "owners of nothingness", accusing us of uncivil and irresponsible, adding to the succulent monetizer of generational hatred of the last ten years.
A headline steroid post that has branded millennials as "killers" of democracy, vacations, or the European Union, and blamed us for annihilating industries like wine, diamonds, going to the movies, of shopping centers or golf.
Well go.
So we have been able to take it all down without messing up,
They say that youth is weak.
Stand up to several crises sailing in precariousness and without being able to emancipate.
To be young today you need a lot of courage.
– Íñigo Errejón (@ierrejon) October 19, 2022
As there are always smarter people who have already explained it before, every time someone appears sputtering about the young apocalypse, I would love to reply silently with a
link
to a brilliant column that Montserrat Roig wrote for
Tele/eXprés
in 1972. In
Insistence on the topic generational
, tired of the dichotomy between literary tradition and modernity, Roig already warned us that “there are no young and old.
Simply, there are people who write well and people who write badly”, that “the struggle between generations can also be an
alibi
comfortable that diverts the reader in the face of more serious confrontations” and that “the proclamation of irreconcilable generations goes very well for careerists, resentful or unsuccessful ones”.
But since it is not digitized and this is a debate of eternal return, like that meme of the man walking backwards from
Grand Theft Auto
, here we are again, condemned to respond to a scratched reproach of using it so much.
Luckily, dissident voices are beginning to stand out in this matter of generational pique —a relatively recent battle because “youth culture” was not considered as an entity and as a succulent market to be exploited until the postwar period.
There is the philosopher Eudald Espluga, who from his essay
Do not be yourself
warns us that "the generational gaze demobilizes" because it ignores other more notable factors such as gender and class.
Or Bobby Duffy, the sociologist author of
The Generation Myth
, who claims that generations are only one of three factors in social change, because historical events and how we change as we age also matter.
Someone should remind the gentlemen who generalize about young people that it is almost as tricky as grabbing onto astrology to lock them up as a typical Aquarius case.
It sure horrifies them to think about it.
Horoscopes are also a lazy thing.