Intergenerational conference
Glasgow, march 2006
(2,081 words)

‘Go Down Fighting’ (a song)

We are alone
The freezing beacons of the night
Dawn is the crack of a smile
A flicker of light
Far away

Hounds of the city
Dancers free
Blood ‘n’ fists ‘n’ watchin the legs
For an hour or two or maybe three

Oh yeah, we gonna rip up the roads,
We gonna draw a line across this land
We bought the song, those old India blues
We’re hangin on, we’re hangin on… sinkin sand

There once was a day when tulips bloomed and stone hills sang
But never mind, never mind about that

We’ll do what we want, we’ll go where we please
Till we’re sixty-nine and cold in our graves
We’ll turn our caps so we look real mean
The reason you can’t put into words, dance, rain

Never move, never move from the spot
There’s no sadness in our eyes
Peasants on a wheel
No thought, no hope, no song
Nothin is real

There once was a day when tulips bloomed and stone hills sang
But never mind, never mind about that

Boozy breasts, dreamless night
The beat never ends
The fire burns bright
Fast, a shot against the wall, and then we’re high
In this dark place, we’ll never die

No past, no tomorrow, no hope of light
Just a shout in the street
And cold stars dance all through the night
We’re hangin on, we’re hangin on… one… heart… beat

There was a day when tulips bloomed and stone walls sang
But never mind, never mind about that

Look up where the moon hangs still
In the endless sky
One day maybe
Our souls will fly

Salaam alaikum, sat sri akaal, namaste ji. Good afternoon ladies and gentlemen.
We were all young once and we all hope to be old some day. Today’s nan or nana is yesterday’s beloved daughter and today’s son will be tomorrow’s daa or dada. During the past hundred years, society has changed more rapidly than at any time in the history of humanity. Generally, in the past, you were born into a particular social class in a particular country and could reasonably expect to remain in your gaon, village, town or city, doing a single job, for life. The first powered flight took place a hundred years ago. Computers came into common domestic use only fifteen years ago. The first of these events represents the pinnacle of the industrial revolution, which had begun with the harnessing of steam power in the C18th. The second epitomises the exponential change associated with the technological and information revolutions, which in the long view have only just begun.

Nowadays, it is likely that one person will live several lives, compressed into a single lifespan. It is entirely possible that an individual may move from being a child on a peasant farm to being a school kid in a big city to being a part-time shopkeeper to being a techie at college to being a home-maker to being a self-employed business person to going through a whole host of jobs for different employers before they retire and become, say, a community activist or a provider of child care. One day, we’re eating bangers-and-mash or karahi ghosht, and the next, we’re snacking on cheese and silicon chips. One day, dinner-ladies are yelling at us: “Eat yer greens!!”, while the next, that Middle English dish, Jamie Oliver, is throwing stuff onto our TV screen and rapping: “Eat yer greens, mate!” (Of course, they’re both right: greens are good!). All this means that we have constantly to negotiate with ourselves, it means that throughout our lives we have repeatedly to redefine ourselves and our relationships with those closest to us. Often, we find ourselves living two or three parallel lives. Combined with big economic shifts, this raises an enormous potential for dislocation – dislocations of work, place, age, family, gender, behaviour, ethnicity, belief systems, culture, sexual orientation, in fact, just about everything that defines us as human.

A lot of this is about power and trust. In an advanced, post-industrial system where value is perceived and constructed exclusively through profitable labour, in Glasgow as everywhere else, families become atomised, split apart into nuclear units and combined with the proto-Fascistic ‘Cult of Youth’ which dominates popular culture, too often, older people come to be viewed as ‘useless’, a ‘burden’, a ‘problem’, their skills and experience devalued, unrecognised. And so the traditional fabric of respect for experience and for the labour of the past gradually becomes supplanted by the cult of the individual. Older people sense this and become insecure, physically and emotionally, and come to mistrust and fear the motives, actions and lifestyles of their exhausted children and their frustrated grandchildren, who in turn feel that they are trying simultaneously to break free of what they see as the shackles of a past with which they have at best a tenuous, contingent relationship and yet also to fulfill their perceived duties, loyalty and sense of identity towards the history that lives within all. At the same time, they face pressures from outside, from the world of work or the world of non-work, from peer groups or oppositional groups, from heightened expectations and all kinds of local and global political dynamics. The struggles of migration, environmental factors, poverty, patriarchy, alcohol abuse, domestic abuse, racism, sexism, tribalism, sectarianism and all the other –isms and the whole confusing delirium of our postmodern world, all these play their part in prising apart one generation from the next. The end result: no-one trusts anyone anymore. And trust - that intangible thing that binds people together in a society - becomes degraded, forgotten.

And so, sometimes, we get older people fearing, disapproving, trying to control the lives of young people. And sometimes, we get young people feeling as though they are in a box marked, ‘dangerous youth: beware’ or else being ashamed of, or derisory towards, older people. Sometimes this arises from genuine concerns over noise disturbance, assaults or other criminal activities, or from misguided attempts to define and fossilise a culture in the face of what is perceived as an overwhelming threat from an utterly different, monolithic, dominating culture. Issues of honour (‘izzat’), shame (‘sharam’), patriarchy and the desperate machismo of insecurity are also relevant. It’s important to understand that young people, too can feel unsafe in their environments - and sometimes, with justification. Like Lowrie-on-Buckfast, at times it seems as though every night the masses are binging, booming and busting their way to the cop-house and the casualty department. I was rudely awoken at three am this morning by a bunch of people shouting at the tops of their voices as they travelled, very slowly, all the way down my street. At times like these, my multi-lingual, intergenerational communication skills would come in very useful - though not in a way that would be repeatable in polite company! Dog-poopers, loud music, bunches of people coming out of pubs, arrogant rich kids in flashy sports cars - these kinds of things are tremendously irritating. But sometimes, the problems between generations stem from lack of knowledge, poor communication, lack of time, lack of money, unemployment, mal-employment or else arrogance and a blind worship of materialism. And then we stereotype people of different age-groups from our own. We assign them a set of beliefs, acts, motivations, which may have no basis in fact. A group of greasers, raggastanis or BBCDs (‘British-born Confused Desis’) on a street-corner is not necessarily a gang! And sometimes, as Malcolm X and the Black Panthers demonstrated all those years ago in the USA, even gangs can be drawn into a political - as opposed to a criminal - process (but for that, you need a politics engaged primarily with people and not corporations because whether you’re black, white or Asian, it’s the power of military corporate capital, ultimately, which leads to alienation). An older person is not necessarily conservative, orthodox or traditional. And indeed, what exactly is wrong with being conservative, traditional or orthodox, as long as it’s not being imposed upon someone? Once, they may have fought against the Nazis, the 1970s National Front or against colonialism. After all, those original black rappers and black revolutionaries - the people from whom Raghav, Rishi Rich, Jay Sean, DJ Khushboo, Badmarsh and Shri, Sonic Gurus, ADF, The Wind Machines, Fun-Da-Mental and the others take their inspiration and from whose work countless DJs around the world sample - are now pensioners.

People need space, both actual space and imaginative - or what we now call virtual - space in order to develop. The pressures on young people to conform and to do what their parents think is right, are enormous. And families can be immensely supportive and nurturing. But sometimes they can be oppressive and damaging – even if the intention is the opposite. And then, of course it drives the young person to do exactly the opposite of what was intended! Sometimes, families don’t have a clue what’s going on (drugs, for example), as the parents are working 24/7 in order to pay the bills. In our postmodern urban society, rebellion is part of growing-up. It’s really an attempt to redefine our perception of a rapidly changing world and sometimes even to change that world. Facilities for young and older people are essential, mutual respect and consideration, equality of being, awareness of social issues and the willingness to discuss these and not shove them under the carpet, an awareness of other people’s fears and concerns, a respect for different modes of living, all these are components of an active citizenry. And all of it begins with listening, communicating, giving both respect and a certain measure of autonomy to the other person, whatever their age, trying to understand the points-of-view and life stories of others - as we’ve been doing today. And this kind of work in communities - on the street, even - is absolutely critical; the sort of work undertaken by schools, Youth Services, the Youth Counselling Service, sports services and all the various agencies and mentioned by the other speakers - and especially peer group work.

Many people who are now older migrated to this country from thousands of miles away, just as, a few generations ago, folk sailed across the Irish Sea or trekked down from the big mountains up north and just as today, once again people are arriving from eastern Europe to make their homes in Britain. But remember, in those days, there were no cheap flights, no digital ‘phone-lines, no world-wide web. And so the voyage was an epic one. They did what they had to do, they made the big break. Now, perhaps, there is a need to allow our children also to make their break. Or just to give them and their ambitions, their spirits, a break. But sometimes, the history, experience and life-learning which older people can offer younger folk is disregarded, tossed aside as irrelevant - and that’s the great loss of the younger people. I never met any of my grandparents, who lived five thousand miles away. That’s my loss, and maybe it was theirs too. Whether or not we like it, whether or not we know it, we all are products of history, of economics, politics and circumstance as well as genes, will and wishful thinking and whatever mark we make on history - in the big things, and the little things - will affect us and those around us in the here-and-now and will send out ripples down through time, far into the future. The point is, whatever age we are at any particular time, we need to avoid limiting our mental horizons because if we limit them in our views of others, actually we are limiting them for ourselves. We are disempowering ourselves, our present and our future. And life, as they say, is short. Of all species, we humans are supposed to be the best at adaptation, at changing our attitudes and actions in response to alterations in our environments. We inhabit the entire globe, from the poles to the equator. But the hardest task of all is to adapt in respect of one another. We have rights and responsibilities towards ourselves, towards attempting to draw out and fulfill that which is best in ourselves, and towards those who make up our society, the people around us, old or young, our families, our neighbours, our enemies - our world.            

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