Sandi Thom’s excellent I Wish I Was A Punk Rocker (With Flowers In My Hair) talks about how great it must have been to be a punk or a hippy, to be part of a generation with a cause or a purpose. So often it seems, to those of us who grew up in the nineties and the naughties, that the new generation is somewhat devoid of a collective mission.
The hippies wanted free love, free life and an end to war. The punks wanted… Well the punks wanted anarchy, I suppose. Those who grew up in the 80’s and 90’s? Well, they have been the lords of consumerism, of easy money and a wealth of ‘stuff’ to enjoy. Their purpose has been to accumulate, and then to ‘share the wealth’.
Once the world had realised these were all, in the immortal words of the peasant from Monty Python’s Holy Grail, no basis for a system of government, my generation have had to pick up the tab.
We can’t have free love, because we know that leads to HIV and worse. We can’t have free drugs, because we understand about addiction, illness, psychological trauma. We can’t have free Rock ‘n’ Roll – Not when Pete Townsend and Ronnie Wood are out there telling us about how they live with the curse of tinnitus and partial deafness. Now, we can’t have free credit, because it’s becoming all too apparent where that leads.
There’s an emergent pattern here, too – each successive generation has taken things to excess, paid for their sins, and then passed on their knowledge to the next in line. Doubtless, in the next 20 years we’ll see a new world-view emerge, go to an extreme and have to be reeled back in before it’s too late, to inform the next lot. Perhaps we’ll, eventually, rally around some environmental cause or against some troublesome aspect of our society. At the moment, though, we’re becoming the Facebook generation – the ones who are always communicating with friends and strangers on the internet – for no great purpose other than to communicate.
Why, though, is mine the generation without a cause? Why are we doomed to live without the binding communal purpose that young people have held in the past? I think I’ve hit upon the answer, and it is beautiful in its simplicity.
We simply don’t have enough to complain about. Even the poorest in this country likely have a roof over their heads, food in their stomachs, music in their ears, televisions, computers and cars. We live in times of relative peace, where even the jobless and destitute are provided with money by the state.
Who would trade that, just to wear some flowers in their hair?