A society that lets its youth down is doomed.
The young run the world. Look around you. The GHQ may be grey and cold, but the front lines are red hot and young. The boardroom may be silver, but the managers and executives are all young. The hilt may be gold-encrusted, and perhaps an heirloom, but the cutting edge is sharpened every day to remove rust and bluntness. Else, the weapon is useless.
The weapon is also only as good as the person wielding it, the one with their fist tightened around the hilt. And if this person disrespects the blade’s edge, the weapon is ineffective.
Young people are rebellious. They are unreasonable. They are indifferent and disrespectful to the norm and to the status quo. They want to push the envelope. They want to test the boundaries. They want to attempt the impossible. They want to, very foolishly, brashly, and badly change the world. And they want it changed now.
They are passionate, overconfident, even abrasive and aggressive. They offend, argue back, and dismiss the old order as obsolete, burdensome, and laughably out of sync. They don’t care about the past, they have no fear, and they are generally overly optimistic and clueless about reality.
And they are usually right.
The only society that survives, prospers, advances, and (if you must use this word) triumphs in the short, medium, or long term is the one in which the elders, the seniors, the wise people, the people with their hands on the hilt know this, and use this knowledge and their infinite wisdom to guide the blade, to use the edge of their sword(s) in a way that all of this anger, passion, optimism, energy, hunger, and desire to change the world is given the freedom, as well as the direction, strength, and support that it needs.
To ignore this is to ignore reality, to ignore history, to ignore all the accumulated wisdom, to stifle the very fresh blood this society needs to irrigate civilisation so that it matches forward.
To the old, who say that the young must fall in line and work within the system, I say, “Careful what you wish for,” because if that happens, we are all doomed.
And to the young I say,
“Forward, my friends. De l’audace, encore de l’audace, et toujours de l’audace.”
