During the referendum campaign some research showed that whilst younger people were more likely to vote Remain, older people were more likely to vote Leave.  This led to the suggestion that older Leave voters should alter their vote to Remain because that was what younger people wanted and the younger people were the ones who would have to live with the decision.  (I know of one voter who did alter their vote in this way.)  This suggestion troubled me for two reasons.  Firstly, in a democracy people should be able to vote as they choose (according to their own conscience) and not be pressured into altering their vote because of what other people want.  I don’t believe that you have to be young to care about the future of the country, any more than you have to have children to do so.  Secondly, thinking through the suggestion quickly led me to the question:  “At what age should we deny citizens their right and responsibility to vote?”  That didn’t feel like a very comfortable question to be asking.

The research findings that started this off did not surprise me.  If I had been 20 years younger I would certainly have approached voting in a different way and may well have reached a different conclusion.  When I was younger I saw things more in black and white, but as I get older and learn more about what can be achieved within the confines of how the world works I see things in increasingly varied shades of grey.  I have not surrendered my ideals, but my choices, which were once directly driven by ideals, are now tempered with a degree of realism.  In addition, experience has taught me that sometimes things that appear on the surface to be aligned with my ideals are actually, when I dig through the shades of grey, running counter to them.

So, young and old do not necessarily hold different ideals, but younger people tend to be driven more directly by those ideals, whereas older people tend to have their ideals tempered by realism.  Not right or wrong, just different.  There is a reason why the term “elder” is still used in certain situations to signify a position of leadership.  It doesn’t mean that older people have all the answers or are right all the time, but it does mean that they might have some useful insights into what may or may not work in pursuit of common ideals.  On the other hand, older people can sometimes be so focused on the details of realistic solutions that they can lose sight of their ideals.  That’s when it is really useful to have younger people around to remind all of us about our ideals.  It’s about balance.  So the old are not better than the young.  Neither are the young necessarily better than the old.  We are all just people.  The young do however have the opportunity to make things better if they are prepared to listen respectfully to the old in order to understand what they learned in living their lives.  The old, of course, also need to be prepared to explain their views patiently and carefully to the young.

It is the same reason as why we need historians to patiently explain the past to us.  The past is not better than the present. Neither is the present necessarily better than the past. Whenever or wherever we are born we are all just people. We do however have the opportunity to make things now a little bit better than they were in the past. But we can only do this if we listen really carefully to those that went before us to understand what they learned in living their lives.  If we can do this then they can give us a bit of a head start.  If we then work hard we can give a head start to the next generation, if they choose to listen to us. It’s called progress.  It happens slowly.