Grandpa Chive, the most veteran will remember, he had a bandaged foot for gout, he sported a prophetic beard and released some scorching embers. Everybody shunned him in the ‘DDT’ comics, including the parrot Jeremías, as soon as the old man He began to make a splash with his military exploits in the Cuban war or with the troops of the British Empire: «On a certain occasion, I was in front of my sepoys, when blah, blah, blah». In popular phraseology, Grandpa Onion has become synonymous with someone who tends to get heavy with the story of his battles, and that’s how I usually feel every time I deal with teenagers. I don’t know where to put myself.
It happened to me the other day in Palamós. An institute invited me to chat with high school students on the literary vocation, on the exercise of journalism. How to tell them that there was no internet without looking like the yayo from the comic? Explain to them that, when the Berlin Wall fell, they had to go down to the catacombs of the archive to get folders with clippings to divide the task of recounting the disaster, dossiers with headings that said: “Chronology of the cold war”, “GDR (Economy )”, “Egon Krenz Biography”. And write to pedal. Pure chives.
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UNQUESTABLE THIRSTThe generational leap has become an Olympic discipline. The transit from childhood to adolescence and then to adulthood is now more complicated than evernot only because the suspension bridge has been shattered —the social elevator, access to housing through savings—, but because the advent of the internet and social media. Teacher friends, parent friends, they tell you about boys who stay hooked on their cell phones until four in the morning, and then they don’t give up. Generation Z, zombie zeta. They want fast pasta. They tolerate frustration poorly. They are ultra perfectionists. And the mirages of the internet arouse in them an insatiable thirst.
In sentimental education, we have gone from slipping at home and the dialectic of “no, because I said so, period”, to a certain sloppiness because it does not give us life, to a laxity that does not impose limits. The other day, in ‘El País’ a interview with clinical psychologist Francisco Villar, from the Sant Joan de Déu hospital, an expert in the mental health of minors, where he advocated that children could only access social platforms after a certain age, as is the case with a driver’s license. It makes you think These are not Grandpa Onion’s rants: in the internet jungle the beasts howl, wolves with very white teeth.