“I hope I die before I get old...” — Roger Daltrey singing The Who’s hit single, “My Generation.”

There’s an age-old conflict between young and old that has been recorded as early as Plato who bemoaned the lack of respect shown to the elders of his day.

For example; the next generation’s music is never as good as the older generation’s classical offerings. Old-timers like me think rap and hip hop are really primal therapy for zombies, and if you want to listen to real music, try The Rolling Stones, Joan Baez, or The Beatles.

My parents’ version of good music harkens to the sounds of the big bands such as the Glenn Miller Orchestra, Tommy Dorsey’s band and the Benny Goodman Orchestra. And so it goes;

Each generation claiming classic rights.

Today’s youth have no patience. No experience. No common sense. No values. No morals. No understanding of history and what it means in their lives today. An old proverb, “Youth is wasted on the young,” reflects these generational gripes.

The older you get, the more experience you have in dealing with life’s challenges that come like sleeper waves, and either you survive or you don’t. We develop a “lifeprint” — our version of a blueprint to live by — that we pass on to our offspring.

When you think about it, the next generation is being raised by the one that complains about it the most. So what goes wrong? Why do the young have to take such different paths? Don’t they realize their elders have everything figured out?

It’s hard to change the current status quo because people naturally resist change if they think their way of doing things is the right way. So we expect our children to meekly follow our well-thought-out lead, but those children have new dreams and ideas that need to filter into our civilization to keep things evolving in the arts and sciences. They need to rebel for the sake of progress.

There’s no doubt that my generation — the so-called Baby Boomers — have made some mistakes. Every generation does. It’s not a perfect world, because if it were, we’d all take singer Bobby McFerrin’s advise in his hit song, “Don’t Worry, Be Happy.”

The distance between generations, like strata in the Grand Canyon, widens the differences between each generation’s do’s and don’t’s. One-hundred-and-twenty years ago entire families attended public hangings in the United States, treating them much as “a day in the park,” complete with picnic baskets and beverages.

Today, we just lock up all criminals up as a society try to ignore them. Most states have abolished the death penalty, electing instead to incarcerate criminals for the rest of their lives.

Which generation was the best generation? Tom Brokaw will tell you it’s the one before mine. The one that fought in WWII, but I’m reasonably sure that many other generations will disagree with that pick. Each believes it was the best.

Every generation has it’s own historians, and it’s this word-wielding fraternity of scribes that determines, from one generation to the next, who is the latest and the greatest one of all. We Baby Boomers will confidently tell you that it is us. Just go to any library or Google “Baby Boomers.” We were all about change, making love and peace, and were against the war in Vietnam.

“Then I’ll get on my knees and pray we don’t get fooled again,” Roger Daltrey shrieked in his generational warning to Boomers.

Parents should be the front line of morality, teaching their children what is right and wrong in the society they live in. When parents fail, especially on a grand scale, you have the seeds of a lost generation. The new millennium is littered with lost souls seeking to survive in an economically unstable world that no longer seems to have rules or families with both parents.

Generations X and Y (20s through 30s) were weaned on cell phones and iPods, financial security and optimism. Now, an estimated 80 million of them are facing a recession that they were not prepared for, and they find themselves forced to take drastic measures, such as selling their electronic toys and 4-Wheel-Drive behemoths, to survive in an economy where the price of gasoline goes up monthly, with no end in sight.

As It Stands, I still haven’t figured out how to dance to rap or hip hop music, and probably never will.

Dave Stancliff is a columnist for The Eureka Reporter. He is a former newspaper editor and publisher. His e-mail address is richstan1@suddenlink.net.