SOCIETY
The Older Generation Regards The Younger Generation
Ruminating on what both may expect down the line
I don’t put much faith in the cliche that youth are our future. It’s true, of course, in the trivial, demographic sense, but it doesn’t suggest anymore that youth will continue to add to our social progress. Do we really have in these darkening times a realistic expectation that the youth of tomorrow will keep society humming along into the future? Or has this become just an unrealistic, irrational hope and a way to deflect our blame for how things have gotten so mucked up?
There’s also the undertone in the cliche that the youth will do a better job of perfecting that future than we older folks have done. A cynic can genuinely feel that there’s not much reason to believe this will happen though. After all, weren’t the grown ups of today the youth of past generations? We older folks were once the hope for the future of our parents’ and grandparents’ generations. Honestly, I don’t think we today can take credit for creating rosier prospects for the generation coming along. Of course, this doesn’t apply to those born to privileged and rich parents. But there aren’t enough of these to be too optimistic. The privileged as a class are known to be highly protective of their privilege.
Many of the youth of today won’t even make it into the future. It’s a sad reality that many older people are destined to outlive many of them. Some will die in the here-and-now of ill considered choices they’ve made. My home state of West Virginia leads the nation in per capita drug overdosing and drug related deaths, as a for instance. To a large extent, those deaths are of young people. Other young people we lose because of choices imposed on them by government and industrial policies that don’t do them any favors. In West Virginia, again, witness our failed extractive industries — timber, coal, gas — which left disease and poverty in their wake as they collapsed.
West Virginia lost three percent of its population between 2010 and 2020, mostly among the young. The state is on track to having the oldest population on average in the country. It’s almost there now.
Even many of those who manage to steer a clear path through all the poverty and social havoc around them leave the state to find their futures elsewhere. It turns out that predatory and greedy capitalism upended the fortunes of my state and it is now having a hard time convincing people to stay, let alone relocate here.
Yet our politicians bemoan the so-called border crisis and want to erect barriers to those who might be willing to settle here. In any event immigrants aren’t moving here, so we’re trying to keep out people who don’t want to be here anyway. As of 2022 almost 14% of the U.S. population is foreign born. In West Virginia that number is 1.8%. Not even the desperately poor and disadvantaged immigrant wants to come here.
I hope those young West Virginians who do leave will make a good future elsewhere, though I regret the consequences to our state. It’s hard to say how much of a future the state has by sacrificing up its youth.
West Virginia is a very red state politically, ultra red and ultra rural, where conservatives control all major branches of government. Here ideas on how to deal with our social and economic issues come mainly from the elitist thought of trickle down economics and from the religious ideology of religious conservatives. In fact it’s the religious right that is driving the economic agenda, more so than the other way around. They boil it down to an argument that without a moral compass to drive society, you won’t and can’t have economic prosperity and security. That’s almost certainly wrong though.
The economic data suggest just the opposite. It’s not red states and it’s certainly not rural settings where you’ll find economic prosperity and buoyant happiness indicators. That happens in cities and suburbs where there are denser aggregations of people. The thinking of demographers is that it’s exactly that density and the diversity of people that makes the difference. There’s more stress, yes, but there are also more ideas and more innovation. It could even be that it’s the stress itself that encourages people to come together to find solutions, if only to try and reduce the stress.
The young people I know from our local state university are not fans of either of the forces driving conservative political success. They are astute about what’s missing from these conservative agendas and know places where it’s different. Since they lack the power to reverse the decline of our state’s fortunes, they go to where they must in order to be heard and to make whatever difference they can. To protect their own future opportunities, they understand pragmatically that they have to leave the state.
Social psychologists use a measure called “openness to experience” to predict other behaviors in people. The measure is an indicator for how much an individual embraces or rejects those people different from themselves — the “others.” You could also identify it as a proxy for racist attitudes. People will tell you they’re not racist, because that’s what you want to hear. They will tell you instead they prefer to be around people like themselves.
It turns out that people who score high on openness are more likely to be curious, to value education, to travel, to leave home, to start over. They’re adaptable.
On the other hand, in a community of individuals that scores low on the measure, you will find places not hospitable to people who are not like them. In rural white America, which is certainly West Virginia, that means LGBTQ people, racial and religious minorities, and in general those individuals scoring high on openness will likely leave. To make matters more dire, immigrants won’t come. They are “others” by virtue of where they were born and, then too, they don’t talk right. An unforgivable lack for some.
Given our two party system, those who do leave are most likely to vote for liberal or progressive agendas, but not necessarily with a lot of spirit. Democrats can “other” people as much as Republicans do. (Okay, but definitely not as much.) This can explain the lack of enthusiasm, as well as expose the truth that politicians of all stripes have not made it exactly easy for young people to be young with dignity. It’s hard to be enthusiastic when all the powers have made it hard for you scrape the bucks together to finish college without having to work two low paying jobs to do it.
The older generations, especially mine of the Baby Boomers, had the benefit of affordable higher education, but we didn’t insist loudly enough that it should be that way for the generations that followed ours. That was our bad, but certainly not our only one. We got caught up in the greed culture that thought we gave too much to undeserving people who were gaming the system and had no work ethic. That would be the same work ethic that is still happy in many places to pay workers a minimum wage. That’s the minimum they must be paid, not the minimum on which to live.
But beyond the damage done immediately and locally here in West Virginia, there’s the reality of global burning, which used to be global warming. All signs now point to us making the environment not a place where we may see a lot of opportunity in the future. It’s becoming more and more a breeding ground for future failure.
At some point soon in many locations around the United States (and the world), the number of bad days in the calendar is going to outnumber the good days. The youth of the future will be spending more of their time, earned money, and energy on coping with fires, storms, floods, droughts, and other paybacks of Mother Nature. Success in these situations will be rarer, though not never, of course.
We might reasonably expect that our current crop of youth will be larger than it will be in subsequent generations. The birth rate is in decline and not meeting the replacement level. Coping in a dystopian setting isn’t going to be conducive to propagating following generations.
This is happening, not just in West Virginia, but in entire developed countries, such as Japan, South Korea, China, and in Europe. It would be happening in the United States as well, if it were not for America still being a favored destination for immigrants. Our future youth here in the States will increasingly come from people not born here. Of course, our conservative voters would like to see the immigrant stream dry up. Better the ship sinks than to take on more passengers to fill the empty berths.
Of course, there is a positive spin that can be put on a declining population. In the case of West Virginia, where it’s happening fast, we will give the land and the non-human creatures that inhabit it time and opportunity to heal. This will eventually — a long eventually, necessarily — make what is still a remarkably beautiful place on earth, even more attractive. Youth of distant future generations might actually find their American dream right here. They’ll be poor by today’s standards, of course, but richer in other ways.
