The More Things Change, The More They Stay The Same; Complaints About Youth

[Bruce Wayne]

I found this on my daily stroll through the interwebs. It just goes to show that older people will always complain about the young.

https://www.reddit.com/r/history/comments/7btv14/the_more_things_change_the_more_they_stay_the/

 

[LizzieMaine]

The feckless irresponsibility and moral degradation of the teenagers of the 1930s was a favorite topic for popular journalism at the time. One of the best-selling non-fiction books of 1936 was a interesting volume called "The Lost Generation: A Portrait of American Youth Today," by journalist Maxine Davis, who concluded that the kids of the thirties were a "confused, disillusioned, disenchanted" lot "who accept their fate with sheeplike apathy," and who could not be counted on to fight for any matter of principle because they themselves had no principles. They were, in her view, "products of a psychopathic period" in American history.

Davis was a mild critic, though, compared to some of the moss-backed academics of the time. Writing in the August 1935 issue of Harper's, critics George Leighton and Richard Hellman declared that the high school students of the moment were a generation "gone so far in decay that it acts without thought of moral responsibility" and were "armed and out for what they can get" as they "rotted before our very eyes."

If you had approached such pundits with the thought that one day these amoral, sexually-promiscuous, swing-crazed, irresponsible, self-absorbed little punks would one day be declared "The Greatest Generation," you too would have likely been declared the product of a psychopathic period.

 

[MisterCairo]

Punks and ne'er do wells, the lot of them...

Why, back in MY day...

 

[Bushman]

Still one of my favorite commercials, just because it's so true!