Not goodbye, just au revoir

It could be my ad­vanc­ing years mak­ing them­selves felt, but it seems to me that we are in­creas­ingly crit­i­cal of young peo­ple these days. De­spite liv­ing in a so­ci­ety that idolises youth, where mid­dle-aged men walk around in hood­ies and ma­ture women have firmer breasts than when they were 20, our dis­dain for youth comes across loud and clear.

Of course, this is noth­ing new. In Shake­speare's, A Win­ter's Tale, the old shep­herd en­ters the stage mut­ter­ing: “I would there were no age be­tween six­teen and twenty-three, or that youth would sleep out the rest.” The old guy goes on to list the faults of ado­les­cents. These days, rather than “wench­ing” or “wrong­ing the an­cien­try”, the 'crimes' we at­tribute to young peo­ple go from lazi­ness (video games) to self-en­ti­tle­ment (liv­ing off par­ents) and every­thing in be­tween.

What is new today, and no fault of youth, is the lack of op­por­tu­nity fac­ing young adults. As can be seen from our se­ries of ar­ti­cles start­ing on page 26, in­creas­ing num­bers of young Cata­lans feel forced to seek work abroad, not be­cause they nec­es­sar­ily want to live in an­other coun­try, but sim­ply due to the lack of op­por­tu­ni­ties and em­ploy­ment back home.

No mat­ter how you spin it, the cur­rent dire eco­nomic sit­u­a­tion can­not be placed at the door of 20-year-olds. While bub­bles were ex­plod­ing and fi­nan­cial sys­tems im­plod­ing around the world, most of these young­sters were still at school, study­ing to en­sure a bright – il­lu­sory – fu­ture promised to them. We, the older gen­er­a­tion, told our young peo­ple that as long as they bet­ter them­selves they will be fine, in­ac­cu­rate as it turned out.

While it is true that the sta­tis­tics sug­gest that a uni­ver­sity-level ed­u­ca­tion makes it more likely for young adults to find work here – de­spite the 50% un­em­ploy­ment rate for peo­ple of their age – there is no guar­an­tee, and we should not be sur­prised if they de­cide to try their luck some­where that ap­pre­ci­ates their hard-won knowl­edge and skills. What's more, it is not un­usual for young peo­ple to want to travel and ex­pe­ri­ence the world, but the prob­lem is not hav­ing the op­tion.

It is too late to do much about it now for those who have al­ready taken the step of em­i­grat­ing. Labour re­form, in­vest­ment in ed­u­ca­tion, pub­lic spend­ing on re­search, such things are ur­gently needed, but even so, it will be the gen­er­a­tion still in short trousers who will ben­e­fit. In be­tween is an en­tire gen­er­a­tion of young peo­ple hung out to dry.

How­ever, as the best strat­egy for deal­ing with thorny is­sues be­gins with the right at­ti­tude, we have to make the ef­fort to be pos­i­tive. This is not the first time that Cata­lans have left their home­land in large num­bers to seek their for­tunes abroad. It hap­pened under tragic cir­cum­stances fol­low­ing the Span­ish Civil War, but it also hap­pened after the Age of Dis­cov­ery opened up the Amer­i­cas to Eu­ro­peans. It is well doc­u­mented how Cata­lans were among the first to try their luck in the New World, and some of them did very well out of it (Bac­ardi, for ex­am­ple).

Yet the best les­son to take from that his­tor­i­cal ex­pe­ri­ence is that many of those em­i­grants to the Amer­i­cas even­tu­ally re­turned to their home­land, wiser and richer. What's more they came home de­ter­mined to make use the knowl­edge, ex­pe­ri­ence and money they had ac­cu­mu­lated. Today, per­haps the most vis­i­ble sign of this phe­nom­e­non are the 'In­dian' vil­las built by re­turned ex­pats in the style of the adopted homes across the ocean, which today are seen as a na­tional asset.

My hope is that a sim­i­lar thing might hap­pen with the young peo­ple board­ing planes today. That hav­ing gained ex­pe­ri­ence, train­ing, qual­i­fi­ca­tions and funds, they will re­turn to Cat­alo­nia and use the ad­van­tages they would never have had ac­cess to had they stayed to im­prove so­ci­ety and en­sure the story has a happy end­ing, at least for some of them.