The Generation Gap
I remember that when I was in my teens, I used to rebel at many of the “do’s” and “don’ts” my parents used to dictate to me. For example, when I kept on playing jazz records on the record player, my father used to condemn such music as sheer noise and replace them with disks of classical music that I always considered extremely dull.
My mom and dad were also very particular about the friends I went out with, always quoting the maxim the “one rotten apple could ruin a whole barrel of apples.” When I insisted that I sleep with my pet dog Peppy, they immediately said NO because they thought that I would be bitten by fleas.
These are just a few examples of many of the things that I thought my parents were unreasonable about. Today, however, I am also the father of a boy of fifteen, and I find that I, too, am pressuring my son with a lot of rules and requlations that he seems to find hard to swallow. The other day, I noticed that my son’s hair was altogether too long, so I told him to go to the barber’s and get it trimmed short. Ordinarily, he is fairly obedient, but this time he put his foot down.
“What’s wrong with long hair?” he said. “All my buddies have long hair. And besides, it’s my own hair, isn’t it? I don’t think you have the authority to order me to cut it short, even if you’re my father!”
When I was a boy, if I had spoken with such impertinence to my father, I know that he would have given me a good thrashing. But I suddenly realized that we are now living in a more liberal world, and that my son’s insistence on wearing his hair long was merely an instance of the generation gap that existed between us. So I relented, and so he still wears his hair long.
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2006/12/13 21:30:00
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The Generation Gap
