Advice from my favorite old fart

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Interesting question and one where the answer you give might change in the course of your lifetime, according to where you are on your own personal time line. 😉
Since I am in the second half of my life now, at least that´s what I assume at 54, I have acquired a bit of wisdom of old age myself and I also tend to expect and demand some respect from younger people now, or better, I don´t really like disrespect, but then, who does?
That´s probably a law of life, to make up for declining physical abilities you want to be respected for whatever you think your achievements in life are, and if there aren´t any, at least for making it that far.

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Many people of my generation in my country have always had a problem with respect for elders because of our unique history.
When I was a young adolescent and learned about the horrors of the Holocaust in school, I was of course shocked and worried about the role my elders had played in Nazi Germany. We even have a name for that generation in German, Tätergeneration, the generation of the perpetrators.

My parents of course were just children then, so basically just victims of the madness which had taken over in Germany in 1933, but what about my grandparents?
It turned out that luckily they were not too "bad". One of my grandfathers was unfit for fighting in the war and stayed at the home front working in some kind of arms production, the other one, my mother´s father fought at the Eastern front as a simple soldier and came home from Russian POW camp already in 1946.
Whenever I asked him about the war, he refused to talk about it and said
"You don´t wanna know!"
He died about 30 years ago and took his untold story to the grave.
So I don´t know if he did some bad shit there, and frankly, now I don´t even want to know, so I guess he was right.

My mother´s mother had been working as a maid for a wealthy Jewish family and when the Nazis came to take the family away, my grandmother protested against it and almost also got arrested, she was just lucky that one of the SA men knew her and intervened on her behalf.

So I decided that overall my elders were ok and I could respect them. They were more leftish anyway, Social Democrat Party voters and I never heard any Nazi shit by any of my grandparents or parents, which was remarkable, considering that my parents had their formative years during the Nazi regime and of course were members of the Hitler Youth, but for whatever reason, maybe my grandparents counteracting the state propaganda at home, they did not get brainwashed.


But what about all them other elderly Germans of my grandparents´ generation? Surely they were not all innocent. So in my youth there was a good chance that if you met an old guy somewhere, he had done some horrible shit in the Nazi era, so I was always a bit wary in dealing with elderly people and sometimes they would even justify my wariness by blabbing some Nazi stuff and the only respect they could get from me then was that I did not give them a beating because I thought it to be cowardice to beat some old fool who would die soon anyway.

Me of course, in my foolish young mind, thought that I would have been in the resistance, so I had no respect whatsoever for all those Germans who either let the horror happen without opposing it or willfully participated. In general, I thoroughly despised this generation as a whole, just my own grandparents were exempt, because with them I had a relationship based on love, not some guilty by association trip.


The whole 68er Movement in Germany, which has its 50th anniversary this year, was to a big part a revolt by young people, mostly students, against a society and social structures they saw as a continuation of the Nazi regime, a kind of uprising against that terrible German heritage, a kind of belated resistance and opposition to authority. They did what their parents and grandparents could not have done without going to concentration camp, revolt against state and society.


Nowadays, with some more insights into human psychology, I think it would have been statistically very unlikely that I would have been in the resistance, because that´s just not what most people will do under those circumstances, so it´s kind of arrogant to claim that I would have been kinda special and a hero.

This realization also makes me view my grandparents´generation from a different perspective now, the arrogant know-it-all twen has turned into a guy who is just very, very grateful that he was born into the soft bed of the Wirtschaftswunder, the German economic miracle, times of peace and prosperity.
And sometimes I also think that this Nazi thing was probably just a cheap excuse for not respecting our elders, some clever trick, writing off a whole generation as not being worthy of respect.

So now, after a bit of a tangent into the historical reasons why some Germans of my age had a difficult time with respect toward their elders, it´s about time to answer the question.

In general yes, you should respect your elders, especially now that I am moving into elder territory myself, but basically you should respect everybody anyway.
Respect to me first of all means giving somebody the benefit of the doubt, rather assuming that you are encountering a decent human being instead of an asshole, so you behave also as a decent human being, giving everybody some advance credit until proven not credit worthy, do ut des, I give so that you give.

But I also very much believe in the merits of meritocracy, meaning, respect is earned not given blindly.
So real respect, the one which extends beyond normal civil courtesy, I give only once I have evaluated the other person and found her to be worthy of my respect and this is of course not a static thing, meaning, depending on their behaviour, people can also lose my respect again.





The one culture with which I have most experience apart from my own is the Philippine culture, because my late stepmother was a Filippina, I have more relatives in the Philippines than in Germany and over the years I have spent quite some time there with my extented Filippino family.

There respect for elders is the law, it´s basically a gerontocracy they got there, so the elders are always demanding respect and all hell breaks loose if you don´t give it.
Usually they think they are right with everything because they are older and, young people are ignorant and inexperienced, and, the ultimate killer argument, ungrateful.
Whenever younger people oppose them, they are being ungrateful.

Even my stepmother once did not believe any of us younger people, when we told her some facts about some inheritance problem, only when my aunt, my father´s sister, told her exactly what I had told her before, she could accept it. Why? Because my aunt can be very convincing (some remnants from Hitler Youth? 😘), but I think mostly because she was four years older than my stepmother, so my stepmother could be bothered to finally really listen properly and take advise from somebody her senior, even if it was only an age difference of four years.

This kind of behaviour is just foolish to me and not appropriate for an elder, but this is how it often goes between young people and their elders and this also has to change if we want to progress as humans.
Yes, it is civil and wise to respect your elders in general, but if they are unworthy of it, they need to be told, don´t let them die ignorant.

Really? Respect your elder philosophers! 😉

@ecotrain

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