Now and then an article comes along that has an energetic ranting amusement factor but combines that with searching wisdom, thereby achieving certain immortality (at least for a few minutes).
Here is one such piece by Toby Young at the Telegraph, letting fly at this piece in the Guardian by John Harris in the Guardian on Generation Y - young people who *horror* incline in a conservative direction:
The most telling passage in the article comes at the end, when Harris meets a 27-year-old in Warrington who's just got a job after a bout of unemployment thanks to the government's Work Programme. Harris asks him whether he thinks his joblessness was his fault.
"Yeah," he says. "I do. I think I should have applied for more. I should have picked myself up in the morning, got out, come to a place like this – tried more. When you're feeling down, you start blaming the world for your mistakes – you feel the world owes you. And it doesn't. You owe the world: you have to motivate yourself, and get out there, and try."
Harris describes this reply as – wait for it – "heartbreaking".
Yes, it breaks the Guardianista's heart that this young person doesn't think the world owes him a living. Instead of becoming welfare dependent, trapped for the rest of his life in poverty and despair – as any self-respecting member of the proletariat should, doncha know – he's actually gone out and found himself a job!
Oh tempora! Oh mores! What's become of the client state? It's as if 13 years of New Labour never happened.
Quite so.
I have three children under the age of 25. All fairly privileged by any conceivable historic standard, although they each work hard enough and should become good honest citizens in due course.
Privileged they may be. But what on earth does one say to them about how they are to make a living in the years and decades to come? The effectiveness and legitimacy of the modern state are crumbling before our eyes. The numbers don't stack up for the survival of the so-called welfare state. Employers seem loth to offer jobs, wanting unpaid work-experience slaves. Setting up a business requires grappling with absurd levels of brutalist bureaucracy (and you need to be good about running a business, plus money to support yourself while the thing grows, if it does). And so on.
The Guardian's answer to this set of problems is clear:
Note also the fired-up voices who have given Generation Y a huge political visibility: the columnist and author Owen Jones, the left-feminist Laurie Penny, the people who have clustered around such brilliantly trailblazing groups as UK Feminista, People and Planet and UK Uncut.
In other words, praise be for a selection of self-selected and self-satisfied Lefty spoiled brats who have literally not one sane practical good idea between them that is going to help us deal with global competition.
Yikes.