Wake up call

Nothing has given me quite so much pleasure this last fortnight as watching the never-ending procession of back-to-back hissy-fitting starring ‘the young’. With all the wisdom and foresight possessed by those whose experience of life post-mum & dad is a four-year degree in Unemployability Studies from a former second-rank polytechnic and a ‘gap-yah’ funded by the parental bank they just know their entire future has been stolen from them by their evil grandparents. Their god-damned, racist, Nazi grandparents who hate them so much they have ended all future prospects of travel, employment, happiness, peace, love and strawberries all year round.

This has greatly angered ‘the young’ so they have taken to social media with garment-rending cries from the heart. They have gathered in the streets with misspelled placards demonstrating their incomprehension at the difference between Europe and the European Union. And they have demanded democracy – on their terms – by insisting that those who voted against them, the old people, should be denied that same democracy. If they had any concept of cognitive dissonance they would be queueing round the block for therapy, insisting that the state pay to treat their traumatic stress disorders, but fortunately their education has dulled their ability to reason and think for themselves.

Somebody once told me that, after the age of twenty-five, you can no longer blame your parents. By the time I was twenty five I had been a homeowner for three years and I was married. I don’t recall ever expecting anybody to give me a leg up. I had heard of mentors, but never actually met one; I just assumed that once you left home that was it, you were on your own. But these days it seems the trainer wheels stay on for decades, with graduate training schemes and carefully plotted career pathways picking up the nurture baton previously passed from parent to tutor.

Seriously, at what point do you begin to do it for yourself? You want to walk the high wire? Then obviously you start low, build your confidence, have your mum hold your hand. Then you progress to height and use a safety net. But at some point you have to leave the net behind and take to the yawning chasms of the Grand Canyon with nothing but a pair of chalked pumps and a balancing pole. Go on, get out there... just get on with it.

It goes down to the difference between left and right again, doesn’t it? On the right I should expect the basics to be there, then for the way to be clear for me to make something of my life. A simple but effective fact-based education system emphasizing fundamental skills such as reading and comprehension, mathematics and science and a bit of guidance on what is out there. On the left, however, there is a demand for a fully comprehensive, step-by-step guide to life itself and an expectation that whatever you choose you must never be judged, you can never truly fail and if it all goes tits up that safety net will always be there. In little over a decade net dependency on the state - those who take out more than they put in - has risen from 43% to 53%. This is not a healthy model.

That's it snowflake, let it all out...

When you’re very young you shouldn’t need to ask. Soon you learn that expressing your needs is enough to have them fulfilled. But there has to come a point where you realise that no matter how hard you cry, help isn’t coming this time. You have to either modify your needs to adapt to your circumstances, or actually do it for yourself. It’s called growing up and it seems to be occurring later and later. A good many of those on the streets demanding that somebody else fix their world are long overdue that awakening.