Various Tangents

I have recently stumbled upon some short videos that I thought were worth sharing. In the greater context, I have been thinking much about the topic of ageism in the Church lately, and these two videos strike a chord.

The first video is this hilarious and timeless “Four Yorkshiremen Sketch” from At Last the 1948 Show (which, was aired in 1967 and has nothing to do with the year, 1948):

The second is this heartwarming video of teenagers trying a Nintendo Entertainment System (a Japanese gaming system that was launched in North America in 1986):

The first video features four rich men gathered around drinking Château de Chasselas and talking about the old days when they were poor. They start with how they used to be lucky to drink tea, then they one-up each other with more ridiculous stories of how hard their childhoods were, to the point where John Cleese’s character claims, “We used to get up in morning at half past ten at night, half an hour before we’d gone to bed, eat a lump of poison, work twenty-nine hours a day at mill for a penny a lifetime, come home and each night Dad would strangle us and dance about on our graves.” Then Marty Feldman’s character follows, “Aye, you try and tell that to the young people of today. Will they believe ya?” To which everyone responds in unison, “No!”

The second video has a completely different feel. As opposed to the grumpy comedians in the first video, this video has teenagers that are genuinely excited about the opportunity to play with an NES. Their eyes light up when they’re asked if they want to play and they laugh at themselves as the figure out how to turn it on and blow on the cartridge. Toward the end of the clip, the teens give reviews that include the phrases, “It’s a shame that kids miss out on this, really” and “Honestly, even today, if you had one, you’d be the coolest person out of your friends.” They were so respectful to Millennials and GenXers who grew up with the NES.

These two seemingly unrelated videos illustrate something that I have been noticing lately: that ageism is often a one-way street. By that, I mean that most generational angst comes from the older generation and is pointed at the younger. Granted, there plenty of examples of young anger pointed at the old. The Baby Boomer motto, “Don’t trust anyone over thirty,” comes to mind. But it seems to me that the fallen human nature cultivates an ageism that is typically more rooted in the older generation. I bring up the “Four Yorkshiremen Sketch,” because it is performed by an older generation in the 60s and has been performed many times since and it always carries the same punch. Regardless of when you tell this joke, it is always funny because you always have that stereotype of the older people glorifying in their hardships while looking down on the youngsters who would never believe it.

This ageism was certainly a problem in Paul’s day, as he tells Timothy, “Let nobody disesteem your youth” (1 Tim. 4:12). I wrote about that in another post, which received mostly positive reviews, save one Baby Boomer on Facebook who insisted that the word, Boomer, is worse than the N-Word… I assure you it is not!

God told Samuel, “For the Lord sees not as man sees: man looks on the outward appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart” (1 Sam. 16:7). Granted, we do not have insight to a man’s heart like God does, but if we look at a person and only see his age, then we are probably looking at the wrong thing.