Are young people sold out?

It’s rhetorical, yes. Are young people sold out by generations ahead of them? Are they sold out for their future? Have they been sold it? Have they enough hope and aspiration to ‘buy-in’ to their future?

Traveling across country to Essex gave me a change from my usual routine and some time to reflect on the show and life as more of a whole. The world seems very much in chaos as we leave the mountains of Snowdonia and drive toward Chester and then on down towards the south. European crafts has suffered many decades of neglect under each different but successive Government since the 1960’s under Ted Heath’s conservatism and Harold Wilson”s Socialist Labour. Both opposites yet unitedly the same in that both parties were and continue to be so detached from reality by their aheadedness (Yes, I know yet that’s not a word but it describes how people who think they see everything yet cannot) controlling education and industry as industries in themselves that determined the future collapse of home made British domestic goods. Back then we suffered three-day working weeks because of the so called “Power workers strike action.” We were caught up a few years later in the “I’m Backing Britain” campaign, which if my memory serves me right was under the crushing rule of Margaret Thatcher’s toryism and which within a couple of years all the stickers were removed from goods as the mass influx from Asia began and potters and steel workers, woodworkers and toolmakers transferred highly skilled workmanship to become the early software engineers and IT people that would launch us into the technological future that really leaves most in a state of being led through the day almost mindlessly. Almost everyone I meet says they are “In IT”. I mean who can relate to that with any kind of real understanding? The next IPad is as essential to most as the water we drink or the food we eat. How bizarre is that?

The USA didn’t altogether escape either. Remember the “Proudly made in the USA” stickers plastered all over the Walmart goods for a couple of year and the same instant removal almost over night? Walmart and all of the rest united with Europe and the whole of the Western world was launched into the wholesale sellout of skilled workmanship.

Ask yourself these questions as you climb on to the helter skelter we call life today. As you launch yourself down the conveyor belt of the Motorway or Interstate this morning to get to work in the USA and the UK: What did it take that everything you put on to dress in or walk on, from the soles of your feet to the top of your head, things once made domestically, to be transferred to another continent to be manufactured? Things that were once made  to tell the time by or listen to or look through? How is it possible that two of the most productive nations on the face of the earth, nations that once produced everything you wore, looked at, looked through, drove in, rode on, walked in, talked through, climbed up, hung from, flew in, painted on; I mean absolutely everything, and export it to another continent and so place young people in utter rejection in unemployability? How could it be that the whole of industry was exported that way and no one really ever asked, “Why are we doing this?”

I believe that these Governments all lacked insight and vision in their experiments on globalising greed, exporting consumerism and neglecting their children. They sold our children’s birthright of work and filled their heads with political claptrap that led to what we have today, which is like a a mindless soup of confused young people who for some strange reason still give us older ones hope that they can somehow make it with their almost useless University degrees. Ask them what inspired theme today. Ask them what responsibility they had undertaken that would determine their future. Ask them if they even consider their future beyond finding some way of making lots of money.

I think that’s why some of us go to shows like the one we will be at this weekend. For me it’s my investment in the future. I hope I meet lots of younger people like my apprentice John Winter. Perhaps I can get them off of the conveyor belt long enough to think.