Letters | 7 April 2012

Generation wars

Sir: Viva Carol Sarler (‘Battle of the generations’, 31 March)! I don’t think I’ve ever read anything as ridiculous as Daniel Knowles’s babblings, which merit a strong riposte. It is galling to read a 24-year-old simplistically categorise all of we ‘baby-boomers’ (I was born in 1946) as the people responsible for today’s economic woes. Yes, a minuscule number of my generation are indeed responsible for much of the greed and selfishness which manifested itself in banking and government, but I am tired of the lame drivel which lays wholesale blame for our troubles at the doors of everyone in their middle sixties.
Mr Knowles needs to be reminded that millions of my generation made enormous sacrifices (in a good many instances placing their lives on the line in places such as the Falklands) as we grew up, and thus find it somewhat arrogant for a chap with so little experience of life to decree we should ‘pay up’ when we have been paying more than our share throughout our working lives.
We enjoy luxuries which our parents did not have, but to get them we went through childhood, teens and young adulthood with much less by way of comfort and security than our offspring and the likes of Mr Knowles now take for granted. His generation should stop bleating and passing the buck, and expend its talents and energy on filling life’s potholes rather than whining.
Anthony J. Burnet
East Lothian

Sir: As a 16-year-old GCSE student, I found Carol Sarler’s claim that currently ‘not a newsagent in sight can find a teenager prepared… to deliver papers’ utterly ignorant. I conduct a paper round myself. Her belief that ‘two solid hours’ homework every night’ is some archaic concept confined only to her school days is also severely mistaken. I do this in order to gain a university place, for which I will have to pay £9,000 annually, whereas she would have had hers free.