Sam Smith – Writing to a friend recently, I noted that there was a strange similarity between those like myself in our 80s and teenagers, namely that our society can’t figure out how to deal with either of us.
It has slowly been dawning on me that 80 somethings are not considered particularly necessary or interesting in our society. The oddity is that as a culture we have spent untold sums to extend lives – now nearly twice the length 150 years ago - but we attribute little but health and social problems to the resulting ultimate generation.
What if these two greatly ignored generations were to come together and conspire against the presumptuous middle aged crowd? After all, it was my age group that created the beat generation, forerunners of the 1960s. We used music to fill the spaces we couldn’t change and I was only 20 when the peace symbol, still being used, first appeared.
I know to many rational minds this seems stupid, but, in fact, change is the result of people doing things for the first time – a typical signifier of stupidity – and turning it into something we call the future.
Just a thought – something one has a lot of time for at my age.
