Viewpoint: Adults should question what kind of role models they are for today's youth

on July 29, 2009 at 8:00 AM, updated July 29, 2009 at 8:22 AM

"What is wrong with young people today?"

This question has been asked by generation after generation, for thousands of years. I believe it was the ancient Greek historian Herodotus, who lived in the 5th Century B.C., who at a frustrating moment and time in his life wrote a commentary about "those young people of today!"

We grow up in stages, and we always respond to the given socioeconomic, sociocultural setting and environmental situations with whatever means society provides, in whatever ways society deems acceptable or denies and rejects as not permitted or as unacceptable.

Young people are handed a given set of circumstances at birth, and they grow into them, they try to adapt and adjust to them, they try to fit in, to find their niche where they will not feel alienated or rejected, or they will manipulate them for their convenience, and often in ways which are confounding, risky, even dangerous. Experimentation, trials and tribulations, pushing the limits -- it's a trademark of youth.

The "older" generation will always look at those coming behind with a mixture of awe, admiration, joy, pride, surprise, jealousy, suspicion, even anxiety and fear. The young wish to be grown up in order to play in the grown-up world by grown-up rules, but they are somehow also considered intruders, and for that reason, the supposedly "older and wiser" put up barriers and hurdles over which the young must jump in order to qualify.

These are the rules and rituals of initiation into adulthood. We call it education, expectations, requirements, preconditions -- the list of semantics is endless, and so are the restrictions imposed by society. Many of these are most sensible for reasons of health and safety, necessary to gain experience and to fulfill qualification requirements, but others are merely a desire to keep the young in line and at bay. All societies, even aboriginal ones, had special requirements and real testing for their youth before they would be admitted into full membership in the adult world.

However, age alone does not make a person mature. Media reports continuously about adults who act as if they were juvenile delinquents, and engage in acts which are not in keeping with what is expected of an adult. Then there is the perpetual desire to be young again, to feel young, to look young, to act young -- and by the same token, many young people consider that to be invasive of their respective turf.

We need a flexible, sensible, and non-combative coexistence, we need to communicate, we need to be there for each other in mutually respectful interaction and interdependence. Adults need to be real role models the young would want to emulate. By the same token, young people also have the inherent right to progress, to grow, and to be and become different. They are not clones.

So, "What is wrong with our older people?" They created the world which the younger folks will inherit at one point, a world which they will have to take possession of, a world which they will want to share in the ownership of, to live and survive in. Now what kind of legacy are they creating?

It is a world which is less secure and less safe because of the conflicts that are raging today, and which are not likely to get better any time soon. Young people did not or do not start wars. They are expected to fight and die in wars which were and are begun by older people.

Young people do not start religious turmoil or ideological conflicts, older people do. Older people impose their various brands of fanaticism on younger people and exploit them for their evil designs. Younger people are sucked into the self-destructive currents created by adults, and are made to be complicit in the evil.

Those who suffer abuse when young, often become abusers when old. Young people see and experience, and then follow in the footsteps of their forebears. Young people are lured into the personal, physical and mental destructiveness of drug addiction by adults with criminal intentions. The same thing goes for cigarette and alcohol addiction, produced and caused by adults, for adult profits.

The Holocaust was not started by the young. No genocide in history was ever started by the young. Younger people do not screw up the economy, older people do.

Are we really surprised that young people have become distrustful and cynical, when we have adults in government who lie, and leaders of corporations who steal and defraud? Most young people do not cheat in business; alas, many, many older people do, deliberately and habitually. Young people do not cause unemployment, older people do. Older people outsource jobs, and in so doing cause fewer opportunities for the young.

Older people cause the nation's indebtedness and saddle the young with its repayment. Young people do not pillage, rape and plunder the environment for profit and then leave it devastated, older people do that with a vengeance.

Should I continue? Confrontation and collision of generations can only lead to hostility, mutual distrust, disrespect, disdain and dislike.

The doors need to be kept open, the dialogue needs to be ongoing, and whenever young people make mistakes, they need to be guided back to where they can feel safe and welcome. It is time for older people to become real role models for the young. If truth and honesty is to survive, let adults be honest and truthful. Adults need to be the guides to the future, and they need to allow the young to make their own mark, to use their own creativity, inventiveness and ingenuity in a positive sense. The survival and wholesomeness of any society depends on such positive generational interaction.

Adults should lead, not mislead. The young have eyes and ears. What they emulate is what they are given to emulate. The hope for the young rests with adults who are heroes, not villains.

Gerhard A. Fuerst is a retired secondary and university educator and resides in Kalamazoo.