Opinion: The kids are all right

There was a thread on Twitter, long before it was renamed X, that used old newspaper clippings to chronicle the myriad complaints old people have about younger ones (one letter from 1943, claiming “Children today are spoiled by too much amusement,” is particularly evergreen). This newspaper has published several similar letters recently.

A retiree excoriated students for falling behind on academic achievement (“Achievement needs to come first in classrooms,” March 25), fewer than four years after a global pandemic killed millions; a Democrat chided young people to ignore the carnage and support Joe Biden (“Voters need wider view than Gaza,” Feb. 12); neither approached the disdain of an 83-year-old man, who claimed – seemingly without irony – that student encampments calling for divestment were the worst American atrocity in his lifetime (“Dismayed by tone and tenor of college protests,” April 26): worse, apparently, than the murder of four student protesters, three of whom were Jewish, by the National Guard at Kent State; worse than the Philadelphia police bombing a residential building in 1985 and killing 11 people; and worse, somehow, than neo-Nazis marching through Charlottesville, Virginia, chanting: “Jews will not replace us” and then being called “very fine people” by then-President Donald Trump.

I think: “When was the last time these writers talked to a young person?”

And then I correct myself and ask: “When was the last time they listened to a young person?” Young people are not frequently represented in these pages in their own words. When they are, they write with compassion and hope.

I think of Dahlia Verrill, the track and field athlete who wrote in defense of a transgender teen participating in her sport without harassment or judgment (“There is space in sports for transgender athletes – especially at the youth level,” Nov. 15, 2023). I remember the climate liaison Susana Hancock who wrote movingly about COP and the contradictions around stabilizing global temperature (“Hard to locate optimism at petroleum-hosted climate summit,” Dec. 5).

I would like to see such perspectives in this paper more frequently. When young people speak, they talk of a better future, achieving their dreams and living in harmony. How sad it is that more adults don’t speak like this. What livable, sustainable future is offered to young people?

Every American under 25 has grown up with regular school shooter drills, rehearsing different techniques to respond to fast, brutal violence because adults have not taken adequate steps since the 1999 massacre at Columbine High School to protect children’s lives.

These students, having watched police fail to protect innocents from slaughter in Parkland and Uvalde, now have the same police turning long guns on them for daring to say “cease-fire now.” I look at these students, who subject themselves to pernicious violence and contemptible invective, simply to demand an end to the indiscriminate slaughter in Gaza, and I am moved profoundly by their bravery and morality.

The kids are all right. You should listen to them more.