Why don’t we Shut up and listen?

Too often I see the elderly talking, instead of listening. They -just like me- think they know it all, and they are so eager to spread their wisdom. That’s a curse we carry on our shoulders, and it gets more cumbersome with each passing year. The urge to enlighten the youth gets stronger and stronger.

“Perhaps if we tell them what we learned, they won’t make the same mistakes,” that’s the logic behind it, even though we should know better. We were told the same once, and we ignored it with an arrogance only the young can get away with.

How dare we wonder why history repeats itself if we are the enablers.

From the sideline, I watched as the United Kingdom voted itself out of the European Union and I knew the older generation had done it. The ones like me -and older- who sometimes wish a time back, that we didn’t like so much when we actually lived it.

The desire to control the youth is strong in every generation. We want them to have a better life, yet we force them to relive our experiences. We are merciless -each generation seems to be.

“They need to learn from us, they need to listen,” we have a message and we want to be heard -yet deep down we know it will be soon forgotten -as it often should be.

I watch the young generation with interest these days. I listen to them when they speak up, even if not all of it seems to make sense in my old(er) mind. How dare we forcing them to relive our nightmares. The rules and laws today are ours -we need to let them have their one please, after all, they are -or will be- the parents of our Grandchildren.