[00:00.49]People are always talking about 'the problem of youth'.
[00:05.01]If there is one -- which I take leave to doubt -- then it is older people who create it, not the young themselves.
[00:13.44]Let us get down to fundamentals and agree that the young are after all human beings -- people just like their elders.
[00:22.36]There is only one difference between an old man and a young one:
[00:26.68]the young man has a glorious future before him and the old one has a splendid future behind him:
[00:34.55]and maybe that is where the rub is.
[00:38.27]When I was a teenager, I felt that I was just young and uncertain -- that I was a new boy in a huge school,
[00:46.49]and I would have been very pleased to be regarded as something so interesting as a problem.
[00:52.37]For one thing, being a problem gives you a certain identity, and that is one of the things the young are busily engaged in seeking.
[01:01.84]I find young people exciting.
[01:04.77]They have an air of freedom, and they not a dreary commitment to mean ambitions or love of comfort.
[01:12.32]They are not anxious social climbers, and they have no devotion to material things.
[01:18.32]All this seems to me to link them with life, and the origins of things.
[01:23.55]It's as if they were, in some sense, cosmic beings in violent and lovely contrast with us suburban creatures.
[01:32.35]All that is in my mind when I meet a young person.
[01:35.91]He may be conceited, ill-mannered, presumptuous or fatuous,
[01:42.07]but I do not turn for protection to dreary cliches about respect of elders
[01:47.90]as if mere age were a reason for respect.
[01:51.22]I accept that we are equals, and I will argue with him, as an equal, if I think he is wrong.
