Our favorite thing when we were children was to visit our old family home in southern Taiwan and be with our grandparents, who loved us more than anyone.
As well as giving us good food and warm clothing, they would worry that we did not have enough spending money, so sometimes when our parents were not there, they would slip us a few notes and coins. No doubt many members of our generation share similar memories.
However, over the past few months we have been seeing retired soldiers, civil servants and teachers around our grandparents’ age taking to the streets, storming the Examination Yuan and setting up camp outside the legislature to demand that there should be no cuts to their pensions.
They say they need NT$50,000 to NT$60,000 a month to get by in their old age.
As onlookers, young people can only feel helpless and powerless. Those of us who were born before 1980 came into this world at a time of major reforms, when a tide of democratization was sweeping across Taiwan, and our schooldays coincided with the nation’s economic takeoff during the 1990s.
However, when our turn came to enter the workforce, we found that our starting salaries were hardly different from those our parents received when they first started work.
At the same time, because of the falling birthrate, each of us had to support twice or three times as many older people as the previous generation.
Then came the dotcom bubble and crash of the late 1990s and the global financial crisis of the late 2000s. The world started changing so fast that the things we were taught at school are no longer quite enough.
Even more worrying to our generation is the possibility that we may never receive our pensions — a possibility that is looking more and more like a certainty.
Such are the woes of our generation, but maybe those older people who have been taking to the streets do not appreciate how we, their children and grandchildren, are struggling to survive while dealing with so many pressures.
Unlike our grandparents, who did all they could to help their grandchildren, the protesters are holding on tightly to what they own, shooing us away and warning us not to expect them to give up a single cent.
We know that those old soldiers defended our country with all their might, those former civil servants worked hard to keep it running and those former teachers educated the nation’s children.
However, now that Taiwan is mired in financial trouble, all that they can think about is how much they can take, seemingly unaware that, bit by bit, they are taking our future away from us.
We are indeed grateful for the sacrifices made by these older people. Who knows what Taiwan would have become, had it not been for them?
Nonetheless, now that the nation’s survival is at stake and the government might run into financial difficulty at any moment, we appeal to those retirees to choose the noble course by giving us younger people a way out.
We call on them not to undo all their past good work by obstructing the nation’s much-needed pension reforms.
Victor Chou is a doctoral student at National Chiao Tung University’s Institute of Finance.
Translated by Julian Clegg
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