I was talking with my parents last week about the gathering scandal surrounding the disappearance of young Shannon Matthews in Yorkshire. For those of my imaginary readers that don't know about the case, visit the BBC website and run a search in her name. Our discussion moved on to the subject of crime in general and child-molestation in particular, when something odd occurred to me: my parents are barking mad.
Not raving lunatics, but quietly psychotic. You see, I have often heard them expound the benefit of torturing and executing criminals, or lay the blame for our deteriorating society on the 'immigants', or announce that we should simply obliterate the Middle-East with nuclear weapons to rid the world of such a troublesome place. I rather fancy that if you come from what we refer to as a civilised western background and you have parents of, say, 60 or 70, you may have heard similar outbursts. But two things worry me and give me hope at the same time. The first is that my parents actually mean what they say! Given the opportunity, I believe that my parents (and most of their generation) would carry out or seriously consider acting upon the most extraordinary of impulses. There would be a whole subclass of neutered, lobotomized, branded and tarred unfortunates, and our cemetaries (or refuse dumps) would be full to bursting with the corpses of those who were found to have crossed the line, or even just rumoured to have done so.
The second thing that worries me is that, as time passes and I stumble awkwardly into middle-age, I am becoming less and less tolerant myself. I don't know for sure whether this is because I am changing in my outlook, or because I am not changing with a steadily more easy-going society, but it is worth considering that every generation's (and by generation, I mean every thirty years or so) standards and morals always seem horrifying to the previous and next generation. Take, for example, my father, who will be quite literally sickened by a television programme about cross-dressing homosexuals, or morbidly pierced new-agers (while I would just be slightly bored), but actually believes that the world today would benefit from a World War, involving the loss of tens of millions of lives, a process he would refer to as 'thinning out'.
War is, in fact, the major note of contention between my generation and the previous one as far as I can see. For most people of my mother's age, it does not really matter that our government has taken us into a conflict with lies to increase the profits of rich business corporations. They just want some arabs killed because they see them as threatening our way of life(!). They were raised in the late thirties and early forties, when propaganda was a way of life and probably gave comfort to them as children, with its promise of justified war-mongering and swift victory.
But there is a difference between the views of my father and those of his parents. They actually witnessed the horror of war first hand, and as is usually the case, condemned it utterly. As far as the other sociological issues go, however, they were even more draconian. It is worth remembering at this point that at the beginning of the nineteenth century (probably at the time my great-great grandparents were in charge) a succession of animals, including pigs and monkeys were executed in Britain for the crime of treason. Barking.
These ramblings have led me on to another of my persistent questions: has there ever been a more selfish, self-absorbed, critical, greedy and morally bankrupt generation than that of our parents? If you, like me, grew up with your mother and father bemoaning the state of society, crime, architecture, crappy household goods and rude behaviour as if it was all your fault, it must have occurred to you at some point that the world we now live in is to all intents and purposes fashioned in their own image. They were a generation that divorced in record numbers, chose careers over children, consumed vast quantities of the worlds resources, polluted the environment on a hitherto inconcievable scale, sold our industry down the river to Asia, consumed illegal drugs in record numbers, borrowed money to the detriment of the world economy, created weapons of horrifying destructive power, plundered Africa, persecuted minorities, perpetrated holocausts and genocides and began the mass abortion culture that, for better or worse, still increases to this day. Then, for good measure, they decided to retire early and blame the resultant shortfall in the National Insurance kitty on illegal immigrants.
And how do they behave now? They are, for all their moralising, the single most rude, brash and outright vulgar of any class of people you can hope to find. They are pushy, tasteless and spoiled. My day-to-day measure of decency is to analyse what kind of people thank me for the small kindnesses I perform throughout the day: holding doors open; a cheery smile; letting a car out of a junction. The grey foxes, I am afraid, perform atrociously, whereas their parents were among the most polite.
I can't think of a single sociological achievement of the last generation that didn't have it's roots in the previous one. The political, scientific and cultural revolutions of the early 20th century eventually gave way to a sort of global pie-eating contest.
Believe me, I have a lot of respect for individual members of that generation, my parents included. But taken as a whole, I wonder whether our present system of existence will ever recover from their complacency and greed.
All of which gives me a little hope. For all I worry about my son, and the life he is going to lead with the threat of street-violence, drugs and hoody-style gang culture, I can rest easy at night knowing that he won't be wrongfully disfigured by some vigilante old goat mistaking him for a pig. Unless we move to Norfolk.
