I’ve been having a ponder about something. I’m not at all sure I’ve come to the right conclusion. Frankly I rather hope not. But then, I am an old duffer. Anyway, see what you think …
It seems to be part of the human condition that every generation, as it grows to adulthood, adopts manners, dress and behaviour apparently designed specifically to outrage their parents.
In my day it was jitterbugging – specially invented, it would appear, to swirl girls’ skirts up and expose their knickers to shameful public gaze.
Then came Rock n’ Roll, not only lewd and disgusting in itself, but accompanied by drugs and cinema – seat ripping and – great balls of fire – men with long hair!
For each of these transgressions politicians have spluttered and fumed and endeavored to put a stop to it all by introducing another bill in parliament, making outraged speeches and blaming the Prime Minister for not being alert to the peril despite repeated warnings.
And, of course none of it has worked.
Instead everyone has eventually become accustomed to the new way of doing things, declared it to be the wave of the future and that all those spluttering goodie – goodies are dinosaurs – long past their sell-by date.
Nowadays we see all around us, young mums with nary a man in sight coping with kids and pushchairs and shopping. Something that would have seemed close to incomprehensible a couple of generations ago. A world where men flit from girlfriend to weekend binge, to another soon-to-be-preggers girlfriend.
And some of us at least instinctively want to stop it. To go back to the good old days of faithfulness unto death and of the family unit as the bedrock of society. The Conservatives want to try to do it by law, re-enforcing the concept of marriage and of chastity before it. (Or at least efficient contraception). And the English Democrats want apparently to go even further, to starve unwed mums and their kids to death so they won’t do it again.
But here’s the rub. It’s not always a case of selfish man abandoning helpless mum.
I know a young woman who has since the age of eighteen, taken aboard at least four live-in boyfriends in turn. All of whom believed they were in for the long haul and all of whom she has dropped, seemingly quite casually after a few months or, at the most a year or so.
And at least one of them has been shattered by the experience. This young lady, now in her early thirties, holds down a good job, rents her own home and drives her own car. She also has a delightful baby boy on whom she dotes and who is obviously well fed, well dressed and well cared for.
She is content with her lot and openly declares that she has no more need of any man in her life
And I suspect she is a lot more typical than many of us realise. I suspect that many young mums, having established a reasonably reliable source of income – whether it be from a job or social security or some other – no longer want a selfish, demanding, perhaps out of work young man hanging around and distracting them from their only real interest – their child.
So by what right do we seek to impose our moral standards on our kids, especially when we so fiercely resented those our parents struggled to impose on us?
Would it not be better and wiser to resign ourselves to accepting it all and adjusting our society to accommodate it? Sooner or later we are going to have to do it anyway. Aren’t we?
