Respect your elders

My stance on the older generation has always been one of terrible confusion. As a child you’re brought up on the standard principle to ‘always respect your elders’. As a child this seems like a fairly simple precedent to follow, you are fundamentally taught to respect a chain of command.

This is the where the terrible confusion creeps into the theory. As a child you are your own ruler. You are comparable to a scientist conducting an array of experiments for example: Why shouldn’t I put that worm in my mouth? Or why can’t I force my friends to eat Pine cones? “I thought it was a fruit, isn’t it a fruit mum? Therefore one of those troubling questions when you’re younger is ‘Why should I respect the elder generation?’ Or paraphrased as a child ‘Why do I have to like granddad, all he does is smoke and shout rude words at the television? An answer that your mother or father will generally give in this situation would follow along the lines, ‘He’s an old man’. That would be the end of the answer and discussion. This stems my difficulty with the paradox.

Throughout my life I have generally treated ‘old people’ with a moderate air of kindness. I think it’s the knowledge and life experience of the ‘old man’ that people are attracted to. It was the roman philosopher ‘Lucius Annaeus Seneca’ that said:

“Nothing is more dishonorable than an old man, heavy with years, who has no other evidence of his having lived long except his age”

I believe it is the child’s naïve understanding of the world and temporality that drive this undermining of the ‘elder generation’. Mark Twain displays this theory perfectly in this quote about his relationship with his father.

“When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years.”