Give youths chance to prove themselves

If you care to read comments by politicians and civic leaders in the local media you would have the impression the young adults of the millennial generation can do no right.

Yes, the swelling ranks of middle-aged or older moral vigilantes, finger-wagging educators and self-righteous politicians have branded the young and restless in today's Hong Kong as nothing more than spoiled brats who like to thumb their noses at the establishment and authority.

Before the ranting about Hong Kong's youth gets out of hand, it is important for critics to remember that they, too, were once held in disdain by people of their fathers' generation. Older people of the baby boomer generation complain that the internet has distracted young people from the real world, making them too self-absorbed to care about other people and the happenings in the world.

There is, of course, ample evidence around in daily life to justify that observation. All you need do is to look around you in the subway or bus where young men and women shut themselves off from the outside world behind their smartphones and other hand-held devices. Some of them even ignore the danger of busy traffic while playing games or sending messages on their phones as they walk.

What about us when we were young. There was no internet to distract us and the only wearable device in those days was the Sony Walkman, which we all loved. But we were chided by our elders for, yes, watching too much television to the point that we had forgotten how to read and write properly.

I remembered that we were called the lost generation who could not express themselves in any language, neither Chinese nor English. Like the young people of today, we were at the receiving end of ruthless complaints from our elders for being pampered and were accused of being "soft", a term for losing the drive for success in hard times.

Despite their "softness", people of my generation had seized the opportunities of the 1980s and 1990s to create an unprecedented economic boom. In the process, many have done better than their predecessors. Indeed, many business leaders, government officials and well-qualified professionals in different disciplines grew up in public housing estates from the poor and under-privileged families.

In a recent report, the BBC delves into the achievers to show that disdain toward youth is not a new dynamic, at least in developed economies. The Daily Mail had this to say about the millennials in an article this year: "Millennials are lazy and think basic tasks are beneath them." This may look familiar to people in Hong Kong who have read similar statements in the local press from quotes of civic leaders.

Laziness, as it turns out, is not unique to millennials. In a 1951 report in the Falkirk Herald, the writer lamented that many young people "were so pampered nowadays that they had forgotten that there was such a thing as walking, and they made automatically for the buses".

We are told again and again that millennials are a whiny bunch of narcissists who are ill-informed but politically correct. That's pretty bad, isn't it? But that downbeat description fits the young people of a different age as well. Here's a passage from a 1925 British newspaper: "There is, as never before, an attitude on the part of young folk which is best described as a grossly thoughtless, rude, and utterly selfish."

Recently in Hong Kong, a worried father in his 50s confided that he was distraught by his grown-up son's language which he described as rough and, sometimes, foul. He must have forgotten that when he was his son's age, Cantonese swearing was very much part of the normal conversation between adults in private as well as in public. In fact, people of his generation use foul language with a great deal more gusto and freedom from guilt than those of his son's generation.

In this free society, young people should be given enough room to think for themselves and make mistakes. That's the only way they can mature to be better men and women than their forebears.

The author is a current affairs commentator.

(HK Edition 11/06/2017 page1)