Reflections in an Old Mirror

Who would be young today? Many of us old fogies express a wish to be young again but I doubt that we mean it literally. The thought springs from a vague desire for a body that no longer aches in the mornings, for the energy and strength that we knew in our twenties, perhaps for the chance to live a life knowing what we know now. We are aware that there is no possibility of rejuvenation in reality, so the wish is just a complaint at the disadvantages of growing older.

Looking at the world around me in my 57th year, I find it hard to believe that any of my generation could want to be young in such a world. Youth is fine as a concept in a vacuum but, when it has to be lived in reality, the problems confronting the young become very apparent. As just one example, the experts are saying that oil reserves will run out sometime this century and I don't particularly want to be around when that happens.

By all accounts, the earth seems to be getting weary of our constant mistreatment too. Whether or not you believe in the depletion of the ozone layer, global warming and an approaching dramatic and catastrophic shift in weather patterns, the fact is that we have polluted our air and our oceans, destroyed acres of forest, encouraged the expansion of deserts by over-farming, driven too many wild animals to the brink of extinction and beyond. It's not a pretty sight to a generation that rejected our parents' misuse of resources; we seem to have made things worse, not better.

So the young are quite right to complain that we have left them a terrible mess to clean up. I don't envy them the task. But complaining solves nothing and, sooner or later, some hard choices will have to be made. I don't envy anyone those choices.

That may seem like a very selfish attitude but it's rooted in reality. My generation had its chance to turn things around and we blew it. Somewhere along the line we were seduced by the stereos, the cars, the big houses, the televisions, the labor-saving devices and the escapism of entertainment. Sorry and all that, but it's the way things are. And the best thing the young can do is learn the lesson that we failed to, resolve to do better, and make good that resolution.

We haven't helped much in our education of the young either. As the beneficiaries of an education system that still believed its duty was to teach how to think, we really ought to have done better in passing on our knowledge and skills to the next generation. Instead, we have put them in front of televisions so that we can indulge ourselves with luxuries, subjected them to idiotic but trendy new ways of "teaching", surrounded them with entertainment and advertising, and avoided the responsibility of discipline under the pretext of being "caring". It's no wonder that the highest ambition of the great majority of them seems to be possession of an ipod. We have only ourselves to blame.

The point is that the young have massive problems to deal with in the future and are ill-equipped to do so. They can blame us just as we blamed our parents but, in the end, they or their children will have to get serious about solving those problems. I wouldn't be in their shoes for anything.

As a Christian, I can look at all this and see that it is just as we were told it would be: famines and floods, wars and rumors of wars, disaster piled upon disaster. But that does not mean that Christians should sit back, do nothing, and, with a wise expression on their faces, intone the words, "I told you so". It is in our nature to try, even when we know the position is hopeless, just as we will always attempt to understand God, whilst fully aware that His unfathomability is an inevitable part of His being God. Of all people, Christians should be involved in the attempt to preserve and heal, to turn the world from its self destruction.

Maybe all generations feel this way; that after them comes the deluge. Certainly that is the feeling in Yeats' poem, The Second Coming (written soon after the First World War) which I have included below. But the thing is, sooner or later a generation has to be right...

No, I don't want to be young again. Let me enjoy the benefits of my age as well as the aches and pains, have my gripes and my grouses at the world, and go to my rest at the appointed time. That'll suit me just fine.

The Second Coming - W. B. Yeats

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all convictions, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?