How did we live through all those years of Cold War, with the actual idea of a nuclear holocaust at the back of our minds, not knowing how things would end? I remember sitting in a history classroom at school - maybe in about 1980 - in an upper floor building where of course the windows were too high for you to gaze out of, with a map of Europe and a large facsimile of Picasso's Guernica at the front - thinking just that: how will things ever change? How could they ever, when opposing ideologies are so entrenched and propaganda so effective?
This is what the next generation may be entering, as another Iron Curtain threatens to fall across Europe, and it dawns on me not to patronise them with stories of how we soldiered on regardless. If they are scared, they have every right to be. They have lived through Covid. They saw democratic politics shaken by Trump. They expect they will live to find out whether we do manage to escape irreversible climate change by 2050. Now they have to live with global political upheaval, and the economic consequences of that at the least.
But perhaps they can look back on the Covid lockdowns to remember that solutions can be found and the unexpected does happen, in the same way that I can look back at the fall of the Berlin Wall. I am also heartened by reports of protests in Russia against the invasion of Ukraine – mostly by young people it seems, who are quickly arrested. They will not change anything now, but they show that Putin is a rogue actor, another Stalin, who does not speak for his nation, least of all its youngest members.
During most of my adult life, after the fall of Communism, we thought the world was heading in one direction - slowly and painfully, but inevitably - towards a greater unity and fellow-feeling; towards the Arthur C Clarke vision of a single planetary union, where barriers are broken down, racial differences are forgotten and wealth is more efficiently created and better shared. We witnessed the fall of the Berlin Wall and a reunited Europe, Nelson Mandela released and transforming South Africa, the first black American president, computing and the internet making communication instantaneous. And the brilliant, happy and unifying success of the 2012 London Olympics seems to represent that whole period of optimism.
But we ignored that fact that the wealth gap kept on growing and that people still believe in the myths of national superiorities in the same way as our ancestors believed in spirits in the woods. And the world was being pushed in unhappy directions by minority fanatics and opportunists who pretended to speak for ordinary people. For me and I think most people, that realisation came when we woke up that morning after the EU Referendum in 2016 and realised we were living in a different country.
I take heart from the values that the next generation hold to. They seem freer of the poison of prejudice. They didn’t want the UK to pull away from Europe. They are the ones motivated to act on climate change. They are on the streets in Russia right now.
It was well said by Billie-Jean King in a TV programme which I watched in 2019. Talking about the difference between her own and the next generation, she said: "This is a monumental moment in our history. I tell millennials - you're the greatest generation in history for inclusion. They don't care where you're from, what religion... they have an opportunity to take this world further than any other and make it a better place."
In the meantime, we have much to be happy about – more, perhaps, than we thought. If we were beginning to take for granted the liberties we are just regaining after Covid, then we had better look at those refugees starting to pour out of Ukraine and remember that we should never do so.
