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 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.