Society in the hands of the Young

While reading "Living Philosophies," I was intrigued by the roll that both Jacques Barzun and Jane Goodall gave to children. When I think of how democracy is going to influence our society, I automatically think of how the youth of a generation will react to it. I think to the different generations and how each had different problems to face, and how much of the time it is the youth that comes forth and decides what type of society they wish to belong to.

When Barzun is talking about becoming mechanical he discusses language. He mentions that "the jargon-bred speaker now feels more at home with the technical label than the primitive word: rain sounds childish compared to precipitation." I think it's funny how true this is. People seem to always want to sound more precise, and intellectual by using big scientific words, instead of simply stating what they mean. It seems like as children grow into adults they are forced to leave behind the honesty of childhood and develop in order to fit into a world where deceit is necessary. Children are the most open-minded human beings, and the fact that they are molded by what they experience makes me want to change the world before they have to live it. Barzun states, "I had a great-grandmother, born in 1830, who talked to me of the world in her young days in such a way that her memories became part of my imaginative life." This is showing that the way children learn is by what they learn from those who they respect.

However it was not always this way. As Jane Goodall points out, it has taken a very long time for us to realize what we have been doing to not only our societies, but to our planet as a whole. Goodall states that, "beauty replaced by ugliness, entire species that took millions of years to evolve vanishing ever more quickly", which is simply saying that over time we have lost respect for our planet, and all that inhabits it, including ourselves. Goodall also believes that, "It is, by and large the young people who are fighting the hardest to heal the human-inflicted wounds of our sick planet." It seems like there is a mix between people relying on the next generation to fix the problems of the first, and the idea that as generations go on, each is trying to make the world a better place for the next.