'It is forbidden to grow old'
A colleague tells me we are in the situation analogous to that of France in the mid 60s, before the May 1968 Events. Why? He has an explanation based in systems theory: it will come, this revolt, he says. We talk about the young, and of the great difficulty of those who have had a glorious education graduating into such mundane jobs (some of the best graduates end up in call centres ...) What matters, we agree, is the distance between glory and mundanity and the overwhelming sense of the mediocrity of an older generation (those who thrived in the Reagan-Thatcher years). My colleague reminds me that this was what they talked about in the 1960s, he and his friends, and that they knew then that change was coming just as he knows it will come soon.
He says: 'it's your generation who will accomplish this'. I say: 'What generation?', thinking of my friends who complain about dead-end jobs and broken lives. Of those creative friends I had many years ago whom I last saw in a shelter for the mentally ill (ill with boredom, ill with frustration with low level jobs, ill because they lack the money and means of transport which are required to participate in a social world ...) And then the others who found misery in what they laughably call their careers (careers! short periods of work followed by long periods of redundancy. Inability to find or keep partners. Living with parents, or depending on them. Depoliticised and Prozac-dependent ...)
A friend and I listen to music from the '60s. I tell her that the band we listen to were teenagers. I say: adolescence is so protracted now. She says: no, there is no adolescence. And she explains and I understand that this was a music which springs out of youth, of an experience of the young. True, I think to myself, and remember a phrase from the Talmud written on the walls during May 1968: 'It is forbidden to grow old'.
'It is forbidden to grow old': what are called careers are blocked to those who lack good connections through relatives or friends. To those without money to select the right postgraduate degree, or those without the geographical advantage of living in area where there is plenty of work. Turn then to the ones who are called drifters and slackers, to the apathetic who do not vote, who have fallen beneath the world of 'careers'. In that same apathy, there is a refusal of our professionalised world, with its semblance of efficiency, its long working hours and its casual exploitation. A refusal, too, of a life course mapped from one's late teens: college, university, perhaps a postgraduate degree, an exploitative entry level job and then the search for a partner, then redundancy, divorce, all this. True, this life is far better than the one of the child-labourer who stitches footballs together, but measured against the life we could lead with vast human potential, it is sheer drudgery.
There is great murder of the earth which takes place in every polluting aeroplane which crosses the sky. A great destruction which happens with the manufacture of every microchip as it depends upon thousands of gallons of water for purification. Then there is the ceaseless suffering of those who live without water, without food which should strike us all with a great blow. The world has been wagered and lost. How to revive that horror at the utter mediocrities who lead us, who teach us, who manage us from that generation who had to do so little to gain their positions, and who demand so much from us?
My colleague, who is not one of those mediocrities, who saw them on the rise and regrets their ascendancy, asks me whether I share his faith in the coming revolt. 'It can't go on like this', he says. I say: 'I've never known anything else', remembering how he said, this colleague, that I belonged to the 'generation of shit' who succeeded the ones who hoped in the 1960s. A generation of shit - but this already assumes that there is something like a unity to those who were born in the 60s, 70s and 80s - that we are not already scattered too far from one another to be capable of political action.
