“What is happening to our young people? They disrespect their elders, they disobey their parents. They ignore the law. They riot in the streets, inflamed with wild notions. Their morals are decaying. What is to become of them?”
Plato first muttered these words back in the fourth century BC, and the sentiment still stands. Youth is almost defined by the outrage it creates within the elder generations, and without maybe even noticing it, your youth starts to run out the first time you hear or see something in pop culture that you don’t agree with.
From parents trying to ban South Park to the Satanic panic in the 80s, it is a well-known fact that even though every grown-up has once been young and maybe even been rebellious, one day a flip will switch, and you will look at the younger generation and see how lazy and annoying they are, and you will think back to your own rebellious years and think about how meaningful and important they were, and it will make you want to shake the new kids because they are wasting their best years on silly music and unimportant issues. You won’t know it, and you probably won’t accept it, but that is the day you become a grown-up.
As a millennial myself, I think our generation has been good at avoiding these thoughts; we have looked at Gen Z and laughed with them and agreed when they told us that our TikTok and old posts on Instagram were lame. We’ve shown mutual respect and laughed at each other’s faults and believed that it would last forever, that the millennials would stay forever young and current.
But a shift is coming. After Kneecap and Bob Vylan’s Glastonbury concerts, I am starting to hear more and more of my friends are starting to talk about how these musicians are stepping over a line and that it doesn’t seem like good fun, not like the type of fun we had back in our time. The sentiment sends shivers down my spine as I remember going to small, gross punk concerts as a teenager, where musicians would set fire to American flags as a protest against the Iraq war, and even though I might not have unfiltered memories and definitely no video footage of these types of concerts, I wouldn’t be surprised if equally colourful language was being used about the Bush administration. I’m not sure if I was the only one going to these types of concerts and listening to that kind of dialogue or if everyone else is just happier forgetting the more unpolished parts of youth, the angry, idealistic, and boundary-testing parts, but it’s starting to seem like the case.
The age of social media means that what used to happen in the back of seedy pubs and basement studios can now go viral, and wars happening across the world can be live-streamed at any time of the day, which means being political or even non-political becomes a political matter.
So my last thought from here is to maybe put on the American Idiot album one more time and remember that Green Day was considered mainstream, even slightly uncool, in most circles, and then really consider if any of us were actually listening to better or worse back then, and how it actually affected you, if at all.
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