Questão 41 - Prova Modelo A - AFA 2025

TEXT II

Generational conflict

         (...) 
        The generations are turning over faster than ever before. 
        While the Silent generation (1925 to 1945) was a strech of
        21 years, the Millennial generation (1980 – 1994) ended 
5      just 15 years after it began. As technological change
        accelerates, people born a mere ten years apart can be 
        released into an utterly different environment. A person 
        born into the era of the smartphone, for example, will exhibit 
       different behaviours to one who predates it, helping explain 
10   those teenagers lip-syncing pop songs and pacing out 
       dance trots in supermarkets and carparks. Technology, like 
       the television, the internet, and the smartphone, have a 
       marked effect on not only how we live but on our values 
       and beliefs. 
15   (...) 
       In his 2020 book Fault Lines: Fractured Families and How 
       to Mend Them, Karl Pillemar surveyed 1,340 Americans 
      aged 18 and over, asking them the question: “Do you have 
      any family members from whom you are currently 
20 estranged? He discovered that more than a quarter of 
      Americans, surveyed, or 27 per cent, reported being 
      estranged from a family member – a parent, grandparent, 
      sibling, child, and so on. Extrapolated to the US adult 
      population, that amounts to some 67 million people who are 
25 estranged from a family member. Pillemar found that ten 
     per cent are estranged from a parent or child and eight per 
     cent are no longer talking to a sibling. Some in the media 
    are calling it a “silent epidemic” of family break-ups. 
    “When we meet people, it’s devastating to tell the truth,” 
30 Skye Ferrero laments, a mother quoted in Pillemar’s book. 
     “We deal with it by being straightforward: ‘Oh, there are 
      problems... we don’t see each other’.” Five years ago, Skye 
      and her husband were cut off from their daughter and 
      nothing they have done since has brought the couple any 
35  closer to her. “I’ve been approached by former neighbours       
      and they say, ‘Well, you seem like such nice people. How 
      come it’s like this? We’ve been labelled with this black 
      cloud.” Skye thinks the issue is more widespread than it 
      appears, it’s just that people don’t wish to talk it. “This is 
40  happening in many families,” she says. 
      Family estrangement can happen for any number of 
      reasons, notwithstanding highly justifiable ones for why 
      someone may wish to cut contact. But such serious offenses 
      aside, fissures in the nuclear family can also happen as 
45 family members squabble over rival ideologies: politics, 
     Brexit, vaccinations, conspiracy theories, pronouns, and 
     any number of headline-grabbing social issues. Nasty 
     comments on social media can inflame grievances, 
     prompting one member to declare, “I’m done. I never want 
50 to see or speak to them again.”  

Adapted from: https://www.newphilosopher.com/articles/generational-conflict accessed on March 21st, 2024. 

About family estrangement, we can assume that