A.
46 .If there is one-which I take leave to doubt-then it is older people who create it, not the young themselves.Let us get down to fundamentals and agree that the young are after all human beings people just like their elders __47____:the young man has a glorious fu-ture before him and the old one has a splendid future behind him: and maybe that is where the rub is. When I was a teenager, I felt that I was just young and uncertain that I was a new boy in a huge school, 48 .For one thing, being a problem gives you a certain identity, and that is one of the things the young are busily engaged in seeking. 49 .They have an air of freedom, and they have not a dreary commitment to mean ambitions or love of comfort.They are not anxious social climbers, and they have no devo-tion to material things.All this seems to me to link them with life, and the origins of things.It's as if they were in some sense cosmic beings in violent and lovely contrast with us suburban creatures.All that is in my mind when I meet a young person.He may be conceited, ill-mannered,presumptuous or fatuous, but I do not turn for protection to dreary cliches about respect for elders as if mere age were a reason for respect.I accept that we are equals, 50 . A.There is only one difference between an old man and a young one