‘Today’s youth, tsk, tsk, tut, tut…’

Oh, jolly good. It’s been a while since I heard a good old fashioned rant about “it-tfal tal-lum” [“today’s youth”]. You know, something along the lines of: “Just look at them, will you? Noses permanently stuck in their I-pads… underwear showing at the back of their jeans… no respect for their elders… Not like in MY day, let me tell you. Back then, we would be booted out of the house at age 13… and we’d only be allowed back in after we had singlehandedly slain our first Woolly Mammoth…!”

Now, that’s the sort of thing I heard all the time back in MY day (let me tell you). In fact, it was so regular and consistent we almost regarded it as background noise: like traffic in the distance, or the drone of an air-conditioning unit down the road.

Along with “whose are you?” [“Ta’ min inti”], the standard way one addressed children back then was to subject their entire generation to a constant hubbub of dark, sinister mutterings in the background. Children would hear snatches of the same conversation as they whizzed past their elders on skateboards and bicycles: the details might change from time to time, but the sentiment was invariably the same.

It always began with “it-tfal tal-lum”, and always ended with a lot of “tut-tutting” and “tsk-tsking”. In between, there could be anything from “you’ll learn the hard way one day” to “you’ll all come to a bad end, mark my words…”

Even back then, I often wondered what those same cantankerous old fogeys might have been like in their own childhood... and whether their elders used to grumble about them in the same way as they grumbled about us. And whether you could project this cycle all the way back to the beginning of humanity itself…

Evidence suggests you can. Consider this quote, for instance: “Children now love luxury. They have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise.”

It could have been anyone from my grandparents’ generation… and replace ‘chatter’ with ‘texting’, and it could be anyone’s grandparent today. In actual fact, however, it’s Socrates: grumbling like an old nanna about “it-tfal tal-lum” way back in (circa) 380BC.

Every generation, it seems, develops a superiority complex when looking at an identical generation just a few years down the line. But then, you know what happens: one fine day you no longer qualify as part of ‘today’s youth’ any more. You fall into that awkward, deprived age bracket which is too old to incur automatic disapproval of the preceding generation… yet not old enough to disapprove of the younger one, either.

In brief, you no longer actually hear that constant litany of dark mutterings, because it no longer applies specifically to you. And for a while, I almost got worried that this millennial tradition had been lost altogether (along with, oh! so many other things ‘today’s youth’ has discarded by the wayside…)

So it was with extreme relief that I heard the Education Minister (no less) giving vent to a good old-fashioned grumble about how ‘soft’ the upcoming generation has grown.

“I feel – and this may sound a bit romantic – that young people don’t have enough of a spirit of adventure,” Evarist Bartolo lamented while launching the National Youth Policy this week. “Malta’s inclusion model that we have developed over the past 12 years is one that encourages dependency, rather than the harnessing of individual skills… Youth must be more willing to broaden their horizons…”

That’s right, Evarist, you tell this generation of namby-pamby mummy’s boys what it was like to grow up in a grand age of mystery, excitement and adventure. Tell them about the good old days, when Malta’s youth travelled far and wide in search of distressed damsels to rescue… or when a wandering conjuror might one day turn up on your doorstep, then whisk you off to reclaim stolen treasure guarded by dragons in distant, dangerous lands...

Today’s youth just don’t know anything about how wildly exciting life was back in the 1960s and 1970s, do they, Evarist? No indeed. No sailing the South Seas with Captain Jack Sparrow for this lot, I can assure you. Talk to them about ‘adventure’ today, and see how they react: “Adventures? Nasty, uncomfortable things. Make you late for breakfast. Much easier to just stay at home till you’re 30, and pick up your stipend at the end of the month…”

Ah, yes. Times change, generations come and generations go… but the ‘tfal tal-lum’ will always be with us, and will always find new and more ingenious ways to cause headaches for their elders.

It is only the complaint itself that varies from time to time.

Back in my day – and I imagine in Evarist’s too - the most common gripe about youngsters in general was that they had become ‘too adventurous’… too energetic, too averse to authority, too unruly, too accident-prone, etc… to ever settle down to a responsible, mature way of life.

Today, it seems they’re not adventurous enough. Too comfortable in their domestic set-up to (for instance) apply for an Erasmus programme, or sign up for overseas training offered by their employers. Too stay-at-home, too risk averse, too cautious, and too reliant on cosy arrangements to ever seriously go out on a limb and experience ‘the real world’.

In a word, too much like the generation that produced them, and which now complains at the similarity.

Hmm. OK, this is where I find Bartolo’s tirade a little disappointing. He got off on the right foot, don’t get me wrong – ‘tut-tutting’ and ‘tsk-tsking’ about the decline in standards across generations, and all that – but he never got round to the ‘back in MY day’ part.

Today’s youth is not ‘adventurous’ enough, he tells us... but compared to what, exactly? The youth of 40 years ago? And if so: what ‘excellent adventures’ did Bartolo’s own generation embark upon a few decades ago? 

I don’t know about the Education Minister himself: maybe he really did go off traipsing through the wilderness without a pocket handkerchief in the company of 13 dwarfs, or something along those lines. But being roughly equidistant between the two age-groups represented in this particular generational gap… I look from one to the other, and don’t actually see very much difference at all.

Starting with the ‘dependency’ argument. If today’s youngsters are ‘too dependent’ on the comforts of their home and/or educational environments to want to experience student life in another country, far away from their individual comfort zones… where did they actually get that aura of dependency from?

And if their lives are so very comfortable that they’d pass up on unique opportunities just to maintain the status quo… well, whose policies resulted in that level of comfort to begin with?

At least part of the answer must involve Evarist Bartolo’s own government, if not his own ministry. Last I looked, both political parties were locked in a permanent electoral arms race, each trying to outdo the other with electoral pledges aimed at every voter segment under the sun: from the hunters to the Armier squatters to the construction lobby to the fireworks enthusiasts, and beyond. And I need hardly add that ‘youths’ in general makes for a rather large percentage of the target market.

So how did the two parties compete for their vote? By trying to make life as comfortable and unadventurous as possible, naturally. At the last election, both Labour and PN promised to ‘strengthen’ the stipend system, for instance… not the only factor contributing to the complacency the Education Minister now complains about, I’ll grant you. But a factor nonetheless.

As for the culture of dependency itself, we need look no further than contemporary Maltese politics itself for national inspiration. You can no longer read a newspaper (on or offline) without getting caught in the crossfire of accusations concerning how deeply both parties are tucked into the pockets of just one entrepreneur: Gaffarena and co. And the more mud is thrown from either side, the more pervasive and entangled this web of inter-dependency between business and politics seems to be.

So maybe, just maybe, ‘it-tfal tal-lum’ are simply emulating their elders by plugging into an equally comfortable, cosy arrangement that works out to their own advantage (if not to the country’s). It is, after all, the combined message all Maltese governments have transmitted across generations for decades now: capitalise on any advantageous situation for as long as you can, and don’t do anything too ‘adventurous’ to ever upset the applecart.

But then again, like I said earlier, it is a millennial tradition for older generations to ‘tut-tut’ and ‘tsk-tsk’ about things they themselves were equally guilty of back in their own day. heck, even Socrates did it… so why not Evarist Bartolo?