From the editor: 'It is easy to find scapegoats but why always the young?'

The schools are back and the students have arrive, cue a whole host of finger pointing and blame.
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There are so many people who are happy to say all our current Covid-19 problems are because of the younger generation. This has been a theme since March although it has really ramped up this month.

Yes, in an ideal world you probably wouldn’t send hundreds of thosands of teenagers to mingle across the country – including 60,000 in Sheffield alone. However, we seem to conveniently forget that this is not of their making. They are doing exactly what they are told to do so perhaps we should look at the reasons behind that rather than looking down our noses at the younger generations.

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If you throw together a group of 18-year-olds who don’t know each other then what do you think will happen? It would be the same in the 1920s or 1960s as it is today. They have fun and get to know each other. That is a large part of what the start of anybody’s university experience is about. So they are following the rules and you didn’t need to be highly educated to predict what was going to happen. Yet here we are – a country filled with concerned parents who are rightly worried at the situation their children have flown the nest in to and students paying extortionate fees for something which is a long way from what they should be getting. If only we were surprised and if only we thought this was being done because it is the right thing for these youngsters, rather than for purely economic reasons. When you look at it like that you might think we are making pawns in a game beyond their control, rather than them being irresponsible and to blame for our woes.

The youngest generations have been made scapegoats throughout the decades. By Picture Sheffield.The youngest generations have been made scapegoats throughout the decades. By Picture Sheffield.
The youngest generations have been made scapegoats throughout the decades. By Picture Sheffield.

It is exactly the same with schools. They are all following the guidelines to the letter and, obviously, that meant that the virus spread quickly as soon as everyone was back in the classroom. We were all young once, even if it was quite a while ago for some of us. Yet we quickly forget that whichever decade formed the guiding influence on our young lives, we were the ones that were labelled as worst than the ones who went before. And that was without a pandemic. The same youngsters who we all hope will be back in our families for Christmas are the ones who we blame. Maybe it isn’t them who need to grow up?

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