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Lesson 5 |
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Youth |
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How does the writer like to treat young people? |
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People are always talking about 'the problem of youth'. |
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If there is one--which I take leave to doubt |
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--then it is older people who create it,not the young themselves. |
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Let us get down to fundamentals and agree that the young are after all human beings |
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--people just like their elders. |
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There is only one difference between an old man and a young one: |
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the young man has a glorious future before him |
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and the old one has a splendid future behind him:and maybe that is where the rub is. |
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When I was a teenager,I felt that I was just young and uncertain-- |
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that I was a new boy in a huge school, |
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and I would have been very pleased to be regarded |
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as something so interesting as a problem. |
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For one thing,being a problem gives you a certain identity, |
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and that is one of the things the young are busily engaged in seeking. |
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I find young people exciting. |
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They have an air of freedom, |
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and they have not a dreary commitment to mean ambitions or love of comfort. |
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They are not anxious social climbers,and they have no devotion to material things. |
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All this seems to me to link them with life and the origins of things. |
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It's as if they were in some sense cosmic beings in violent and lovely contrast with us suburban creatures. |
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All that is in my mind when I meet a young person. |
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He may be conceited,ill-mannered, presumptuous or fatuous, |
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but I do not turn for protection to dreary cliches about respect for elders-- |
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as if mere age were a reason for respect. |
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I accept that we are equals,and I will argue with him,as an equal,if I think he is wrong. |
