'Never As Bad As We Had It'

Living with two elderly people, as I am doing at the moment, you quickly learn never to say anything negative about what has happened to you. It does not matter how ill you feel or how bad or mad the traffic you have driven through; it does not matter if you have lost your job or your house or are separated from those you love. None of these things can even come on the scale of what the elderly have experienced. I guess if this was the 1950s and I was living with old people who had experienced the late Victorian period, then the First and Second World Wars, I could accept that they had a point. However, the two I am living with are 74, i.e. they were born in 1938. Yes, they remember the war as children and better remember the rationing which persisted until 1956. However, most of their lives have been lived in times of what seemed to be for at least two decades, increasing prosperity and improvement in society. Any elderly person, who is younger than them, say 65, has even less to complain about as they were born into the welfare state and a period of full employment. The 1980s were a horrible time but the experience varies considerably depending where in the country you were living. For many in coal-mining and other heavy industrial areas it was the end of their working lives. However, in London and other prosperous cities, it was a time of making profit from property; foreign travel and consumer goods. Even the slump of 1990-3 now seems to have been a blip compared to the decade of economic depression we are now assured.

Of course, in every period, even the greatest boom, there are people who miss out. I lived in East London for over six years and on £9500 per year in the 1990s was a wealthy man in the districts I inhabited. Even then in what now seems to be a boom time, I knew people living in bed and breakfast hotels with their babies and young children, eating in fried chicken shops as they had no kitchen facilities and never travelling more than a couple of miles from their homes, just as if they were a medieval serf. Yet, even they were better off than their Victorian equivalents and were not starving to death on the street or separated and exploited in a workhouse. They were, of course, worse off than their 1960s equivalents who could look forward one day to getting a council flat and a job. Even in the 1990s, things seemed far better than now. As yet, I have not read anything written about the impact of the introduction of the minimum wage on areas like East London. Certainly I noticed a great change, even when employers tried to claw back some of the pay they were now supposed to (and generally did) give, through various tricks. The doubling of someone's hourly rate due to the minimum wage, I saw had a significant impact, if only on the profitability of convenience stores, takeaways and laundrettes in the area I lived.

I guess I probably look back on those days with nostalgia. When I saw a programme some months ago which said that many British people would probably view the period 1997-2007 and the 'best years of their lives', I was a little sceptical but think I have now come around to that perspective myself. It is argued that the post-war boom ran from about 1948/55-71/73. However, with 2008 we seem to have ended even the post-boom period. It is as if the experiment of the third quarter of the 20th century, has finally, through the sustained efforts of hardline Conservatives been brought to an end. The sense that society needed to work for prosperity in general rather than for the already rich alone and the belief that people fell on hard times through no fault of their own so needed state support, have been crushed. That period now appears to have been simply an anomaly. Instead we are getting back to the kind of society that someone in 1892 rather than 1962 would be very familiar with. If you think of the Dickens novels so many of them could be translated to now. No, there are no workhouses and instead Oliver Twist would be in a children’s home where he would be sexually abused, just as children were in the Victorian period; the age of consent was only raised from 13 to 16 in 1861. Workers are losing rights by the day and for example, employees at Comet turn up to find they have two days work left. Housing is beyond the reach of most people even in the middle classes.

Two-thirds of people receiving benefits are in employment. I will say that again, two-thirds of people who receive benefits are in work. This is not because they are cheating the system, it is because their employers are allowed to pay them so little that the state has to subsidise their income in order for these people to have a basic standard of living. Without rent control, rents are rising, far faster than incomes. Most young people have given up on the idea of owning a home and people like me have slipped from being property owners to being tenants once again and exposed to the tricks and exploitation of landlords/ladies and especially letting agencies. Food and petrol have always been expensive in Britain and remain so in relation to incomes even with supposed competition between supermarkets. Utilities since privatisation have always been cartelised and prices continue to rise unchecked. The government continues to peddle the myth that to get into work is to solve your problems, whereas in fact that is a lie. Back in the 1980s, some Conservative argued that Britain had to become the Taiwan of Western Europe, a low-wage, high-tech economy, banging out cheap consumer goods. We are roughly in that position now, though with less of the high-tech than we might like. Yet, despite the low wages, British industry is not booming, in large part because so much of profits is not reinvested and instead goes on salaries, bonuses and paying shareholders. Apparently a company director can earn as much as 350 times what the lowest paid employees in that company earn. We have returned to a Victorian socio-economic pattern yet lacking the output and sales that Britain enjoyed back in that era.

Despite all these problems, to the elderly, it can never be as bad as the times they lived through. The traffic now, despite its increase, the presence of so many huge cars driven poorly and the disappearance of traffic police, somehow cannot be worse than it was in the 1990s. Employers with their ability to sack whomever they choose, with their obsession on minutiae and workers’ declining ability to go to tribunals, somehow cannot be as bad as twenty years ago. Yes, employment might be better than in 1952 or 1972, certainly in terms of discrimination, but it is certainly not as good as 1982, 1992 or even 2002. There is a particular challenge in being listened to in Britain and that is the country’s love of complaining. I know other countries have people who moan and complain but if it was an Olympic sport, Britain would have won gold every time. One point of moaning is to trump the others around you, something well satirised by the sketch from the Monty Python comedy team in the 1970s when a group of northern English men keep portraying their lives as worse than the others to the extent that one states he lived at the bottom of a lake and worked 29 hours per day.

There is a chain of behaviour. An elderly person says that it is not as bad as what they experienced. Thus, you being unable to cope with it shows you must be incompetent. As you are incompetent, you are unworthy of any help. The help they give, however inappropriate, they believe they give for charitable reasons. No matter how grateful you say you are for the help, you are not then permitted to criticise anything about your current situation. The elderly believe that their charity eliminates any problem that you might ever encounter for ever more. Consequently if new problems arise or old ones remain unresolved, you cannot mention these without triggering charges that you are ungrateful. You have to accept the help no matter what other costs there are or even if the help is in fact less helpful than if they had done nothing. I often use the example of my father giving a lift to my girlfriend and driving so fast and recklessly that she was terrified. Simply expressing that terror at the time means that even five years on she is regularly criticised for that statement she made as it apparently shows how rude and ungrateful she is after all this time. I know The Who said, ‘I hope I die before I get old’, certainly if I ever behave to younger people like this I insist someone comes and shoots me. Life is hard without incessantly being told you are useless and ungrateful for years to come.

Is there any risk in the elderly dismissing the challenges and concerns of younger people? Yes, because it means they do not take serious problems seriously. They dismiss them as nothing compared to the burdens they had to face. Consequently they do not give appropriate practical support or even listen to what they are being told. Sometimes just being heard can be vitally important to someone under stress. Above all they are prone to being deluded by politicians who tell them that there is no need to worry about benefits cuts as these are only impacting on the lazy and the feckless. The elderly public’s view of younger people as simply complaining about trivialities rather than the genuine problems they encountered, feeds right into this. Of course, we know that 60% of benefits are paid to people actually in work and many of the unemployed go in and out of the job sector as they are employed on short-term contracts that are so common these days. Benefits are a subsidy to employers wanting to keep wage rates down and their profits incredibly high. Cutting them off would have no impact on their behaviour, they would probably simply relish the control they have over people who had no alternative but to work for low wages in poor conditions or face starvation. The number of children in Britain not eating breakfast or not eating breakfast and lunch is incredibly high and the reappearance of rickets caused by malnutrition, an illness almost eliminated in the mid-20th century in Britain, shows that, no matter what the elderly feel, we have returned to the lifestyle of the Victorian poor.

Beginning To Live Like An Old Man

Back in October 2007, when I turned 40, I noted that unlike the old saying 'life begins at 40', it seemed that the reverse was the case and you began to feel that your life was clearly running down towards its end:  http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2007/09/life-begins-to-end-at-40.html  Almost three years on, my prophecy seems to have been borne out.  In the last couple of months I have heard that officially 'middle age' runs from the age of 36 to the age of 59; after that you are 'elderly'.  Thus, I have actually been middle aged longer than I had realised back in 2007. It also appears that, on average, from the age of 41 your body generally starts to deteriorate.  This is no surprise really if you think that the average working man just a century ago had a life expectancy of 41 and a woman of 45.  If I had been 43 in 1911, then I would be an old man in my community.

This analysis has reassured me.  For the past year, if not longer, I have felt old.  Now I know that that should not be surprising, because by the measures of when my mother's father (a man I knew in his 70s and 80s) was a boy (he was born in 1900), I am in fact an old man.  There has been no sudden deterioration, but a steady accumulation of ailments (as opposed to diseases or even conditions) and with them a changed outlook on life.  Of course, I have suffered from diabetes for over twenty years and that is accelerating the decay of my body, but there are other aspects which seem to stem simply from ageing.  I think you can tell you are old when doctors say they can do nothing more for whatever mild condition you are suffering from. 

Two years ago my left knee swelled up; it was blamed on me carrying too much shopping (I invested in a shopping trolley as a consequence, adding to my sense of ageing) and all the creams I was offered have had no effect.  It is not painful, it is just still swollen and squidges when I kneel down.  My joints, limbs and other parts of my body now ache even if I happen to run a short distance, something it is hard to avoid when you have a 9-year old boy living in your house;  throwing a ball to him for 20 minutes left my right arm in pain the next day.  Cycling now leaves me nauseous and dizzy; travelling on an aeroplane leaves one ear and the skull around it in pain and me with partial deafness for days afterwards. Driving about 200Km is enough to leave my hands and calves aching for days after. Even one quick session of sex, with my established partner, with me on top, leaves my chest and arms aching as if I have been pressed under heavy stones.

My digestive system has suffered most.  I have become incredibly flatulent and also belch a great deal.  In the past few weeks constipation has come to give me a variant from very loose bowels, often ringed by haemorroids and faeces so large that they jam the toilet (I have to keep plumber's equipment by the toilet; no domestic version will work).  I have no appetite and very little taste, my tongue now being furrier by far than my head.  This has helped me loose weight as I always feel full, which I guess has to be a plus, because apparently from 41 onwards you naturally begin to become heavier.  Eating food is often not a pleasant experience, which is a shame as I used to really enjoy good food.  Now I can get heartburn even before I have eaten a mouthful and it gets worse as the food goes down.  I have been told this may be due to 'acid reflux' which means stomach acid now randomly decides to bubble up towards my throat.  Often after a meal no matter how small, it feels as if someone has jammed a stake with the diameter the size of my palm, between my lungs and then out through my back.  I had to abandon drinking coffee as doing so made swallowing every mouthful of food painful.

I guess a definition of old age is that you are no longer physically capable of doing the things you have always enjoyed, not least without paying the price in subsequent discomfort.  Mentally I am less active too.  My writing of fiction has dropped away severely as has my reading of any books.  Partly this has been due to a sustained period of unemployment, but nothing seems to be able to stimulate my interest again, even having got a job.  I struggle to concentrate to follow an 2-hour episode of 'Foyle's War'.  I must say, however, that my manner has improved, I get far less grumpy with bad drivers, lost documents and my computer going wrong.  That, however, may simply stem from the resignation of getting old: you know there is no point in getting angry as no-one will pay you any attention and you can change nothing.  One consolation is that I have lost important things right throughout my life and this does not seem to have increased now I am getting older, so I can probably cope with this far better than people coming to it anew.  My memory has deteriorated.  I know that I was never good at remembering names, foreign words or martial arts moves, but now I am finding that I am mis-remembering things.  Scenes I thought were in a particular movie turn out to be very different to how I remember them and buildings in very different places.  I am fortunate that my current girlfriend is far more forgiving of these flaws than her predecessor who was angered if I forgot even the tiniest detail she had mentioned once in passing.

Above all, I am very tired.  It goes beyond simply needing more sleep.  Like many people, in the past, I hoped that I would live to a certain age and see certain things or achieve certain things in my life.  However, now, I realise that if death came to me now and I had not read a particular book or had not visited a particular place then I would not feel disgruntled in the way I would have done a few days ago.  I certainly understand now how people see death as a rest.  However, I had a premonition that I will die aged 57, so I will have to hang around for a bit more yet, with more decay and ailments to put up with.

Other consolations for my physical and mental decay is that I am beginning to enjoy things that older people do.  My parents, madly, have become far more active in their old age than when my age.  My father now cycles 35-50 Km per week; my mother has joined a gym which she visits every week to work out in and walks 11 Km; they are both 73.  However, I have found I am enjoying more leisurely pursuits.  At the park with the 9-year old boy from my house, I found rather than playing with him, I got far more pleasure simply sitting on the bench and watching the activity around me.  I did not need any other physical or mental activity to be content.  

I accept that my medical condition has made my body older than my age would typically warrant.  I do worry that given I feel as if I am twenty to thirty years older than I am, how bad will I feel when I am actually 65.  It seems highly unlikely that I will be as active as my parents and in fact, by then, may simply be bedridden and ready for a nursing home.  In some ways, though, in contrast to two or three years ago, my mind seems to have caught up with my body and that is a great relief.  It would be incredibly frustrating if I still had the desire to travel or start up new things only to find my body was constantly complaining.  I am glad I have found the contentment to fit with the age of my body and that now, I can quite happily sit and watch life go by.

Skill of the Past: Using a Cassette Recorder

Having been literally bullied sick by my boss, whose picking up on small things I may have said weeks earlier and then assembling them into a file which apparently demonstrates my unprofessionality (if there is such a word) despite her committing many of the same 'offences' such as receiving personal phonecalls at work, has driven my blood pressure so high as to leave me debilitated.   Back at home I am obviously seeing more of the woman and her 8-year old son who live in my house than of recent when I have primarily been living in another town in the very social class divisive South-West of England.  Anyway, the boy came to me the other day because his mother had said that I might have something him to record music with.  Neither his mother nor I are in a position to buy him a minidisc or MP3 recorder which would be the modern type of system.  However, I did remember that stored away in the shed was a hand-held cassette recorder that I used to use in the 1990s for recording interviews.  It was not one of those mini-cassette recorders that people used as dictaphones back then, it takes full-sized cassettes.  We have had a few machines around the house that take cassettes and my car which is now 14 years old takes them too.  However, I would not know where to go to buy a blank cassette and the only place you can get music on cassette is in the cheaper charity shops like those associated with hospices rather than the big national charities.  Surprisingly quickly I found the machine.  Usually it takes a couple of hours for me to sift the stuff stored in the shed only to remember that I gave the thing away a few months earlier.  I so regret giving away my copy of the 'Talisman' board game when I left Milton Keynes.  The boy in my house would have loved it and even if he had not given the number of expansions I had to the original I could have sold it for over £100; the basic game sells for around £30 on eBay and rare expansion sets for over £200.

I have heard that following the concern in the 1970s that traditional skills were being lost we now have more thatchers in the UK than we have work for.  Every episode of 'Time Team' over its sixteen years seems to have drawn on a different craftsman/woman able to make pottery or mosaics the way the Romans did or weave or make swords the way the Saxons did or cook or dance the way the Tudors did.  It seems that we have sufficient guardians of the 'old ways' for now.  However, what this incident with the cassette recorder showed me was how fast other technology-dependent skills are being lost.  I suppose if, like my grandparents I had lived from the 1910s to the 1980s I would have seen many skills that were no longer needed as mechanisation of all aspects of our life, notably in the home, advanced without cease.  Technology dates very quickly.  I remember the acclaim that the University of Hull received back in 1986 for putting the Domesday Book on its 900th anniversary into computer format.  By the end of the 1990s no-one had computers that could access those files (though ironically people can still read the original book).  This year it was announced that a project to update the computer files was complete.  I wonder how long it will be before these are obsolete.

What I was surprised was that a child whose reading age is well advanced compared to his physical age and is able to programme the Freeview box, search the internet for downloadable games and asks me if I use Google and Word, found it so tricky to operate a cassette recorder.  I realised that the key challenge came from that the rules of cassette recorder are mechanical rather than electronic.  He quickly mastered pressing the 'Record' and the 'Play' buttons together in order to record.  He worked out he needed 'Fast Forward' and 'Rewind' because he is familiar with video cassettes, though even his 2-year old cousin has grown up in a world without them.  What the 8-year old could not get was the concepts of how the cassette machine worked.  When he rewound to find what he had recorded, he asked 'doesn't it know where the music is?'.  Naturally on an MP3 recorder it would know.  I had to teach him about looking at the spools and how far they had wound on and matching it against the little indicators on the front panel.  This recorder had no counter but I must say I have not seen one with a counter in twenty years.  Then he complained that the music had been lost and we found out that in switching cassettes he had put it back to play the B side rather than the A side on which he had recorded the music.  He has never encountered a recording storage item with two sides.  DVDs have one side, CDs have one side, even archaic video cassettes only have one side (unless someone can show me a Phillips cassette from the early 1980s; anyone remember them?).  He even had difficulty opening the cassette box as it looks different to a DVD or CD box.  To me it was a matter of a flick of my thumb but I had to demonstrate a skill that very few people in the world know how to do.

I guess all of this is simply a reflection of me getting old.  I do not feel incapable of operating successfully using current devices but I have probably not slipped into the assumptions about all technology based on what is currently the norm.  Perhaps in the future we will be surprised to find we used to have press buttons (even if these are increasingly simply squares on the screen rather than actual physical buttons) and not command a device by our voice or our thoughts.  I do think it is worthwhile making a record of those little skills that we never even thought about when using them, such as the rules and norms around operating a cassette recorder (the fact that you will not get 'disk read error' but that the tape might snap) and a score of other devices which were once part of everyone's home and are now going the way of the upright washing machine and the valve (and even the transistor) radio.

Putting Young People in Demonised Categories

One thing which is noticeable when talking to the 6-year old who lives in my house, is how his school demonises 'teenagers'. His school only takes children up to the age of 11 so seems to feel free to portray teenagers as responsible for all the crime in the local neighbourhood. This has been done to such an extent that to this boy and his friends the term no longer designates a period of life most of us go through, but has become synonymous with the word 'criminal' or at least 'delinquent'. In the past we clarified our labelling and they were called 'teenage delinquents' to distinguish them from normal teenagers, but that distinction seems to have disappeared. Of course some of the crime in the neighbourhood is committed by teenagers but a lot of it is not. When a bench was stolen from the school playground, teenagers were blamed. If it had been found turned upside down in the nearby park with tags sprayed all over it, I might have agreed, but it entirely disappeared from the district. No teenagers could be bothered to carry a heavy wooden bench for three miles. It is clear it was stolen to order by people with access to a van and able to leave no trace, this does not sound like teenagers. Yet, the school somehow feels it has to be teenagers and not older criminals.

What situation does this leave the 6-year old and I imagine all the other children in the school as they edge towards becoming teenagers themselves? I know in comedy, notably Harry Enfield's teenage character, Kevin, they mutate into a surly, argumentative being. However, now these children also imagine that they turn into criminals automatically too. This has grown to the extent that when the six year old sees teenagers he assumes they are committing a crime. We saw three boys probably ages 12-14 carrying a sofa and he said they must have stolen it. Then we saw them stopping at the house of an elderly woman and delivering it to her. It became clear she had bought it from a nearby second hand store but had been unable to transport it home. These boys were actually aiding their community but the view of the 6-year old had been so distorted he simply assumed a crime was being committed. Becoming a teenager is very tough anyway, you go through puberty and have all the issues of peer pressure, developing interest in the opposite sex (or the same sex) in a sexual way, acne, deciding what academic path you are going to go down, image issues and so on. There is often pressure to commit crime petty or more serious. However, the way that the school has been educating these pupils is that, well of course they will all commit crime because that is what teenagers do, they cannot help themselves. Coming from a Christian school this is a terrible abdication of direction for their pupils.

The bulk of teenagers never commit a crime, just as the bulk of the population never commits a crime. So why is the school not pointing out role models of teenagers who make a positive contribution? In the district there are Scouts, Guides, Boys' Brigade, martial arts, sports, dancing and drama clubs and other societies through which teenagers do a great deal. Why are they not pointing to them so that in the next few years when their pupils are fed along the conveyor belt of life into being teenagers they can see that crime is not the only option and that they can make moral judgements which are surely part of what being a Christian is about, if not simply about being a human in a civilised society. The school offers to alternative to the pupils, it is almost as if they have been damned to being criminal teenagers and nothing they can do with get them away from this predestined path. They do not even do what private schools are and try to create 'young fogeys', i.e. children with middle-aged attitudes, you know the sort, painfully apparent in the UK certainly, and from what I have seen New England too, they are 40 at 14 and miss out on the important challenges and test of character during their teenage years and ultimately find coping with life difficult even if they have avoided the seemingly inevitable criminal path.

Even when young people have managed to get to the end of their teenage years having been condemned as inherently criminal throughout, they are then beaten with the stick of being a 'student'. Of course those who do not continue study can end up in criminal circumstances, but it seems ironic that in the UK those who try to improve themselves are condemned almost as severely as those who try to find unskilled work and are blamed for living off state benefits. This whole attitude seems weird. Where does the population want people aged 13-26 to go for that period? They seem to simply want them to disappear into thin air and reappear in their late 20s. There is a meeting I saw advertised this week in a town in the South of England, it begins with the line 'due to an unprecedented influx of students into this area', which immediately is a lie. The university has been there for a couple of decades and students have always lived near it. The large increase in numbers going to university was in the late 1990s and early 2000s and whilst there are year-on-year fluctuations, there has been no huge leap, it is just the locals are becoming resentful of students. Anyway, they are going to seek a 'solution'. Students have become so demonised in this area that the approach is beginning to smack of persecution. The only tolerable option seems to be simply to drive them out of the town.

It seems that the only council I am aware of who know what financial benefit students bring to a town is Portsmouth. Neighbouring Southampton wants to restrict the amount of student accommodation in the city and Bournemouth farther West along the coast is beginning to behave the same. The attitude towards students is now becoming like that towards prisons or needle exchange centres or even wind turbines. People want more of them to be built, as long as they are not in their area. Britain's development is being slowed by this attitude.

In Bournemouth the university suggested that it buy and develop a derelict retail site be turned into a new student hall even though it is a number of miles from the university campus. It would hold 7-800 students, equivalent to, say, 160 households of students removed from houses across the town. However, complaints have been raised about this scheme too. So what do people want? They do not want students living in their streets and they do not want them in an area away from residential houses. Again they simply want them to disappear into thin air. If they did, suddenly a lot of the shops that those people like would lose a great deal of custom. Bournemouth University has 16,000 students who literally pump millions of pounds into the local economy, but the local population would rather forego that and gripe about young people. They will neither assimilate the students nor ghettoise them, they just want them gone. I can understand that the seasonal pattern of students do disrupt the nature of a locale. Partly this is caused by landlords simply buying up as many properties as they can to rent out to students. I know one road where six houses in a row are owned by a single landlord and rented to students, they lie empty all Summer. Of course no-one would dare say that the patterns of purchase of landlords should be restricted, because, that would be restriction of free exploitative capitalism, so, instead the blame has to be put on the tenants (as always!), who in this case are students.

Of course there are students who behave badly. Then again there are people aged 18-21, students or not who behave badly. A lot of that stems from Britain's appallingly immature approach to alcohol consumption which marks us out sharply from our European neighbours. Every weekend though I can see men and especially women in their 30s and 40s vomiting into gutters just like younger people, in fact often worse, because they have more money than the students trying to work their way through university. In fact in a pub these days the student is far more likely to be behind the bar working than in front of it consuming as almost all UK students now do many hours of paid work each week to keep down their vast debts. So, I accept there are bad students, but as with teenagers they remain the minority. The ironic thing I have found over the past few years is the sharp criticism of students during the Summer and around Christmas. People portray them as 'outsiders' coming to their town and causing problems, without thinking that at those times of the year, the students around are actually the children of the local population who have come home from university for the vacation. Of course, the reality never gets in the way of demonising young people.

The UK population needs to rethink how it interacts with teenagers and students. At the moment the approach is to condemn them all as criminals and rowdy louts. No positive role models of young people that accept that it is hard being young especially in these times when so many opportunities are being snuffed out and young people face so much pressure to behave in ways that are deemed 'tolerable'. Even when they behave perfectly fine there is no credit given, which produces a terribly nihilistic attitude among the young people. Why should they bother to try if they are still going to be lumped into a huge demonised category? That is not going to resolve tensions in communities. You might as well say, that because old people move slowly and smell, and take up the pavements with their walking frames and their electric wheelchairs, and because they play their television so loud you can hear it doors away and yappy dogs, that they must be banned from town centres. This is the ridiculous level to which young people are being categorised negatively. The UK police and local authorities have more powers to prevent 'anti-social' behaviour than probably any other state in the EU (possibly excepting Germany) and so if there is wrong or disruptive behaviour by people, no matter what their age, it can be stopped, there is no need to keep rubbing in the complaints, which generally impact most against the teenagers and students who are not behaving badly. Being a teenager or a student is not a bad thing in itself, it is individuals who decide to behave, to say otherwise is no different to the Nazis saying that Jews were evil, or apartheid South Africa that blacks were stupid and lazy. See individuals for what they are, do not simply read the negative label you assign all the people of that type.

P.P. 18/11/2008 I posted this just at the right time. Today I read a report on the BBC website which highlights a Barnardo's research which shows young people are 'casually condemned' with 54% of adults thinking children 'behave like animals', 43% said they felt adults needed to be protected from children and over a third thought the streets were 'infested' with children. Comments on websites of national newspapers said teenagers were 'feral' and should be 'shot'. Taking up this line, Barnardo's is running an advertisement in which adults are shown as hunting down 'vermin', i.e. teenagers. There is no denying that there are young people who do commit crime. However, whereas people think teenagers commit 50% of crime, in fact they only commit 12%. You are at more danger by far from adults than from teenagers. The United Nations last month highlighted Britain's intolerance to young people. This is unsurprising given that even schools who should be highlighting the achievements of good children are simply putting out the same negative stereotypes. Consequently it is unsurprising the attitudes shown up by this research suggests that the only solution many adults can think of is violence. None of them take responsibility for the fact that some children end up this way. The whole response is irrational, you cannot eliminate a whole generation and in fact they are far less of a problem than is assumed. Alienating young people just exacerbates the problem. Adults who can make their voices heard are just scapegoating young people who cannot.