I have been reading a book of short stories by the brilliant early 20th Century mystery writer Melville Davisson Post and, in one of his stories, I came across a short description of an encounter between a wealthy young American on a train bound for Nice, France and an old Frenchman who was on the train traveling to Mentone, France for his failing health. As they talked, the young American realized that the Frenchman envied him, for his youth, for his good health, for his wealth and ability to go to Nice to spend the winter in a luxurious hotel. As the American left the train compartment at his stop, he looked back to see the old Frenchman huddled against the wall of the compartment, “his big shoulders shaking and his fingers pressed in his mouth, as though he feared a hemorrhage.” The American thought to himself that the sight saddened him, “thus to pass by age and its inevitable weaknesses as one entered into the gate of pleasure.” I couldn’t help feeling a sense of affinity with the old Frenchman. I look around me and see the many bright, young professionals that have joined the workforce in recent years and who have been given greater responsibilities, greater salaries, and greater opportunities for the future than those of us old-timers who have devotedly toiled in long, dedicated careers. These new young workers’ arrogance doesn’t allow them to experience the concept of pity that Post’s young, wealthy American felt for his French travel companion, not that many of us would ever want to elicit such an emotion from these young up-and-comers, but shouldn’t they show some measure of deference to their elders, some appreciation to those whose years of experience and hard work paved the way for their newly budding careers, to those who are being pushed out of the way to make room for these haughty, bullet-proof young professionals. But their narcissistic self-interest doesn’t seem to allow them to waste a precious moment of their valuable time on such old, used-up, wasted baggage, so they just shove the old people out of the way in order to get on with their agenda of “new” ideas, processes, and procedures, most of which they will eventually discover have already been tried without success by the old workers they so disdain as useless. Thus, in a role reversal of Post’s wealthy, young American, perhaps we old-timers should feel saddened as we look at the bright faces of these arrogant, narcissistic, young men and women who have so much to learn, but refuse to acknowledge that any old person could possibly know anything that would benefit them. So they’ll reinvent the wheel, they’ll tilt at windmills that were constructed for very valid reasons long before their time, they’ll fill their lives with Social Media and self-congratulatory pats-on-the-back for doing half the work at twice the salaries of their elders, until such time as the mirror shows them that, horror of all horrors, they have become us – old, unappreciated, and unwanted by an ever-renewing younger generation and their arrogance won’t save them from that ultimate fate. Time stops for no one. Now that’s truly sad.
Posted on: Fri, 20 Sep 2013 21:20:25 +0000
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