Dawn

Dawn

Friday, April 21, 2006

There was a touching cri-de-coeur from a young woman in El Mundo today. It includes many of the complaints made by today’s young Spaniards. Here it is in full…

I suppose reason and logic lie behind their words. However, for some time I’ve been tired of the comments of reporters, philosophers, columnists and a variety of others about our generation – we are conformists, we don’t have values, the only thing that interests us is boozing, and if we mobilise like French youth it’s because of self-interest and not because we have values.

Well, I’ve reached the point where I’m tired of all this. I’m sorry, I was born after the crisis of ’73. Mea culpa for belonging to ‘Generation X’, in which statistically there’s more value in having a primary education than in studying to get a job. In which people like me, a graduate in History, can only find work as a door-to-door salesperson, or selling hamburgers, or working in a supermarket while we wait for you, children of the baby boom, to retire and leave us jobs which it’s clear we can’t get without the personal contacts others have, though there is always a remote chance. We are dedicating ourselves to several more years’ study so as to take the government [civil service] exams/lottery… But we have to be idealists, we have to believe the Establishment, caciquismo*, and the practice of endogamy** won’t defeat us. We have to sing in the wind and search for sand under the pebbles of the beach, thinking about Camus and Sartre.

I’m sorry, but those of Generation X no longer believe in a new world …. The now-bourgeois demonstrators of ’68 and of the Transition have showed us what happens to idealists.

* Literally, political baronies. Traditionally powerful in fixing the local vote. And much else.
** Keeping things in the family. Giving jobs only to one’s students and not, therefore, on merit.

And talking of disaffected young women . . . My elder daughter tells me she’s posted two chapters of her novel, ‘Stalking Time for the Moonboys’ on her blog page. So please rush along to fayedavies.blogspot.com and take a look.

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