We’ve been getting it wrong for centuries. The expression, that is. I know it usually reads “age before beauty,” but the latest thinking shows that’s just not right.
Beauty, we have concluded, most certainly ought to come before age.
Just look at the latest articles swirling around the public sphere. There are young ladies writing about how awful old people are for stealing houses, rigging Brexit elections, and stuffing all of our hard earned cash into their pockets for retirement.
Then one of the oldies wrote an article and agreed. Just look at us, he said. We claim pensions while we’re still working, and we use our Gold Cards instead of just looking at them. Oldies, he concluded, are awful human beings, indeed.
So, in the spirit of this new revelation, I’ve decided to expose some of the ways in which oldies are attempting to hold back beauty and destroy it.
Brexit: How dare those oldies out-vote us young’uns? I mean, the fact that about 75 per cent of them turned out to vote, while almost the same proportion of young’uns stayed home is irrelevant. And the fact that, in hard numbers, more oldies voted to remain part of the EU than did young’uns, while even more oldies turned out to vote leave, it also irrelevant.
Whether we vote or not, we should get what we want.
Housing
The housing crisis, as per the new revelation about age, ought to be blamed on the oldies. And I couldn’t agree more. Making responsible financial decisions in the face of lower wages and much higher interest rates doesn’t matter. And actually paying those mortgages off over the past 30 years doesn’t qualify you to have the right to own a house, let alone sell it off for a profit.
The simple reality is that if we can’t own houses, no one should.
Education
If you thought it couldn’t get any worse, it turns out the oldies are scamming our education too.
Can you believe that we’ve had to pay for some of our own education, when they got it for free? And it’s not like we waste the money we do get on buying drinks for the weekend or take-away food. No, those crippling student loans got that big all by themselves.
And anyway, this one thing is certain. We must never, ever be grateful for the things oldies did pay for, and we must always complain about what they failed to pay for.
Flag
The heart-rending condition of the younger generations in New Zealand is topped off by the fact that we weren’t allowed to change the flag.
It was, after all, a vote for future generations. It should have been about what we wanted, not what the oldies care about.
The logic to this is irrefutable. Obviously the previous generations who fought and died for our freedom under that flag shouldn’t be allowed to feel nostalgic about it. Nor ought they hope that we would respect that sacrifice and what the flag meant to them.
No indeed, it was horribly inconsiderate of those oldies to hang onto such an old relic when they could have thought about our feelings.
Conclusion
Yes indeed, the oldies are refusing to bow to the new logic. They simply don’t seem to understand that beauty, with all its superficiality and transience ought to trump age, with all its experience and wisdom.
At best this makes them cold-hearted. At worst, they have undermined our entire futures.
And if there is ever any doubt of that, we need only look at the logic they passed on to our generation.
This article was originally published on Stuff.co.nz
Zambezi Kiwi 