Let’s trust our elders on this one

Have you ever looked at a photo of yourself from just a week ago and thought, “Man, I wish I knew then what I know now?” Have you remembered things you did 10 years ago and felt like they were done by a completely different person? Do you have untold volumes of sage advice you would pass down to your high school self?

Now think about all the accumulated knowledge stored up in people who have lived two or three times as long as you have. If you’re impressed by how much you’ve learned in the last couple of weeks, start adding up week after week until it gets into the tens of thousands. As the saying goes, when an elderly person dies, it’s like losing a library.

In the past month, however, America has decided it would rather steep itself in the nascent wisdom of a bunch of young people who have yet to graduate from high school.

Sure enough, there’s an excitement to seeing a young generation of Americans get so involved in pressing issues of the day. (Although kids the age of the Parkland shooting survivors have been fighting in American wars going back to the nation’s founding, and doing so without the gratification of having a Twitter hashtag named after them.)

The gun control kids are emotional, telegenic, and frequently wrong. But they’re attractive because they represent the promise of new ideas and unexpected possibilities. Like the child rulers from centuries ago, they have been imbued with a magical ability to affect societal change before they’re even allowed to go see “Get Out” in a movie theater.

Plenty has already been written about the wisdom of allowing children to speak with authority on complicated issues that intermingle history, society and government. It seems a better use of time to make a positive case for experience.

Older people have seen wars and assassinations. They have witnessed terrorist attacks and the spread of deadly diseases. They were around in the mid-1960’s when Congress passed gun control and homicides increased. They remember that the “assault weapons” ban of the 1990s made little difference in the amount of gun crime in America.

But that is the appeal of using young people to push a political message; they don’t remember any of these things, so their idealism is unmoored from history. They are free to adopt the attitude of Lord Henry from Oscar Wilde’s “The Picture of Dorian Gray” — that “Experience was of no ethical value. It was merely the name men gave to their mistakes.”

Perhaps my affinity for the aged is rooted in the fact that they tend to be more conservative. Republicans almost always win voters over 65 by wide margins, presumably because of older voters’ desire to “conserve” the world they have known since childhood.

Of course there are plenty of seniors who support the aims of the Parkland survivors, just as there are plenty of elderly people who shouldn’t ever be on TV expressing their unfortunate views on race and sexuality.

But at some point in the future, many of the young people speaking out today are going to look back, see the video footage, and wonder if the fresh faces on the screen are even them.

Christian Schneider is a Journal Sentinel columnist.