Intergenerational divide in our politics and world view
Politically, we can see a large divide in the aspiration and acceptance of ‘outsiders’ between the generations.
My Grandmother (and many thousands her age) have become increasingly conservative in their world view. From what i can gather, their experiences growing up straight after WW2 in a culture that still had lots of echoes of the wartime propaganda left an indelible mark on their attitudes to the outsider.
I grew up in a multi-ethnic society, with children from multiple places around the globe. To me, there is no fear or mistrust in seeing people from other ethnic backgrounds around me. But for my grandparents, there is a lingering Nationalism, a lack of acceptance of ‘otherness’ - socially, sexually, racially. Brought up in the social strictures of oost-war Britain they reject the social liberalisation that they have lived through. One could argue that they didn’t really get to experience the full force of the social liberalisation. Many married young and had children young, many women stayed as full-time child carers and had little interaction outside of the home. Many had large families in the models of their parents before them. Their children have experienced the social liberalisation fully (sexual revolution, oral contraceptives, relaxation of the divorce laws), they grew up with a few non-white faces around them because of Windrush (immigration to UK from newly Independent West Indies) or from Indian sub-continental immigration before and after Partition. Their children (my parent’s generation) were also the first people to truely benefit from the way that membership of the EU opened up travel around Europe and the North African coastline. They experienced the realities of live in other countries and these experiences changed how they think. My grandmother has never been outside the UK in her entire life.
Now, at the point when she is starting to struggle with self care (and here i definitely agree with @johncoate 's view that there is a stubborness and irrational sense of personal independence in their generation) more of the balance of looking after her falls on her kids, whose lives have been so different from hers.
My point then is a difficult one to conceed. Although my grandmother is my family and helped to raise me, i find spending time with her very difficult. Her views are borderline racist at times, her attitude to the world is very negative, her experience is narrow and her opinions old fashioned. I am expected to show respect and deference to her based purely on the fact that she is older than me, yet i know my experience of the world is richer and wider than hers. I wouldn’t want to be forced into living in that straight-jacket in order to reduce care costs.
I do think that there are some positive ideas coming through around intergenerational living though. It’s not that i’m intrinsically against ‘old people’, i think the irony is that i’m not especially fond of MY ‘old people’. I would be more than willing to help look after a number of more liberally minded old people. It comes down the idea first put forward in the Open&Change discussion in HuisVDH
“Free, but alone.” vs. “Belonging, but coerced”
For me, i’d rather free and alone. But i can also see the attraction of belonging. But not the coersion.
Perhaps this strength of intergenerational bond in Middle Eastern culture is down to having a more cohesive and consistant view of the world than we have in the West. Our horizons have expanded to include views about social and personal freedom that still struggle to gain ground in more conservative cultures.