Standing Room

9 May 2009

Unlike the swine flu hysteria currently gripping the globe, the affluenza pandemic of the Nineties and early Noughties (first identified by the clinical psychologist Oliver James) was a virulent, socially transmitted disease most of us subliminally hankered to catch. ‘

In retrospect we grown-ups have behaved appallingly — we recklessly danced until dawn, emptied the drinks cabinet, chugged down the happy pills and then trashed the joint, leaving our poor kids to clear up the almighty detritus. Generation X have spawned Generation Ground Zero. My children are all standing on the threshold of life’s big adventure and have been given no choice but to make do and mend. They can’t afford to live on the never-never; instead they must live in the here-and-now. Probably forever. We must not allow them to assume affluenza and its associated complications are a terminal bequest. We must somehow infuse them with hope for the future and not let them be buried by apathy.

‘My generation differs from yours,’ my 22-year-old son recently reflected. ‘You could follow your passions. We don’t have that luxury. We have to concentrate on surviving.’ I don’t want him to feel like that. My great passion is optimism and I choose to believe that the deep scars we’ve left on the landscape can eventually heal.

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Ken Bishop

May 8th, 2009 1:26pm Report this comment

How curious to keep saying "we all" overindulged. I didn't. I serviced my mortgage, bought things I could afford, and paid my credit cartd off in full every month. And now I get a lecture that the recession that has cost me my job is somehow my own fault. Not only untrue, but insolent.

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