Paul McCartney

Early this week Sir Paul McCartney took out adverts in the National Press. His "late-wife’s" new single contains some of the most offensive swear-words and because of that Sir Paul complained it is not being played by radio stations. The advert itself produced as much reaction as the new record. It seemed to seek advice "Parents! We need your guidance!" it began. Tongue in cheek it demanded that parents listen to the record and consider whether it will "corrupt" their children. Despite using phrases like "We need your wisdom" It ended very differently "P.S. By the way young people, we know you don’t listen to them anyway".

There’s no doubt that a gap between the generations exists and has always existed. In some eras it’s a very pronounced gap and when Sir Paul was a Beatle and I was one of his Young People it was more like a chasm. My mum and dad were solid working class folk, conservative with a small "C" who had gone through a World War. I took part in our school’s first ever strike, in fact if I’m being perfectly honest, I organised it. I went to Woodstock!…well at least I queued up with hundreds of other Glasgow teenagers to watch the film and pretend I’d been to Woodstock. . I liked my mum and Dad of course but we inhabited different worlds, even different universes. My heroes were light years away from theirs. Hendrix burned his guitar on stage, would Glenn Miller have ever considered setting fire to his Trombone?

Not too long ago I was pouring over a nasty letter I had received from the Bank. One of my sons came in with a toy he was trying to glue together. He asked me for assistance and I rather abruptly told him to leave me alone, couldn’t he see I was busy? I went back to worrying about money and the Bank. Then I remembered a very similar incident that had happened to me when I was a boy. I needed my Dad’s help and he was simply too busy to give it. I remember thinking how inadequate he was as a father…after all; he was not instantly available! It was only when I became a parent myself that I appreciated the job my mum and dad had done.

Honouring parents is one of the Ten Commandments; it’s one of the Bible’s building blocks of civilisation. Judaism says, that one of the first tasks for the Messiah apart from all the well-known ones like ending wars, is to heal the generation gap. There always was a generation gap, Pop culture celebrates it, but bridging that gap is essential; because when one generation ignores the previous one, it condemns itself to make the mistakes of the previous one, including wars. Paul McCartney’s P.S. "By the way young people, we know you don’t listen to them anyway" is a generalisation. I work with young people; it’s simply not true. Many young people do listen to the advice of their parents and even seek it. What I had to wait till parenthood to discover… they already know, parents can be worth listening to.