Friday, October 19, 2007
It's time to confess -- we blew it
From the RoundTable blog
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Jack Call
Call is a professor of criminal justice at Radford University.
I'm part of the generation of the '60s and '70s. We were outraged at the mess our leaders had made of things. We marched with Martin Luther King Jr., protested the bombing of Cambodia, took over the offices of our college presidents and burned our draft cards. It was time that something was done about this mess, and we were the right people to do something about it.
Thirty years later, it's time to confess: We blew it. One can argue that the overall standard by which any generation should be measured is whether they passed on to their children a world that is better than the one they inherited from their parents. By that standard, we have failed.
Our parents faced a world (in the '30s) that was on the verge of economic disintegration. It decided to band together and turned to government as the vehicle for looking to the greater, collective good. We survived and became a stronger nation.
In the '40s, the free world faced the specter of subjugation at the hands of fascists. Our parents fought bravely to spare us that fate (while many of their friends lost the chance to become parents). They showed us the value of sacrifice and the importance of dedicating ourselves to principles that were larger than selfishness. Again, we survived and became stronger.
Neither of my parents went to college, but they saw higher education as the means to a better standard of living for their children. They stressed the importance of getting a college education and worked hard to ensure that I made it through college. And they were right -- I have been blessed with a standard of living well above what my parents enjoyed.
This is part of what my parents' generation gave to my generation. What is my generation giving to our children? We did wage the Cold War successfully, in some respects our environment is cleaner, and I suppose that economically things may be a bit better than they were in the '60s and '70s.
In so many other important ways, we have left our children a world worse than the one we inherited. The prospects for a peaceful world seem worse than they did at the end of the '70s. Global warming threatens the survival of the world that our children (and their children) are inheriting. Rather than finding a solution, we have spent more time arguing about whether the problem exists.
When I have discussed these issues with members of my generation and today's younger generation, I have observed two distressing phenomena. The first is that many of my contemporaries are in denial that the world is in worse shape now than it was 30 years ago.
This is unfortunate for at least two reasons. First, it interferes with our ability to learn from our mistakes. It is impossible to learn from mistakes if one denies that they occurred.
Second, it creates a barrier between us and the younger generation. The younger generation, consciously or unconsciously, blames us (in part, at least) for the shape the world is in. We cannot build bridges of communication with them about this situation if we continue to deny that the situation exists.
The other phenomenon I have observed is that young people today are often extremely pessimistic about the future. As one teenager put it to me recently, "I would rather be my mom's age today than when I reach that age." There is no hope that the younger generation can do a better job fixing the world than we did if they are resigned to its inevitable demise.
Is there anything our generation can do to make amends for its failure to give our kids a better world? We can begin by taking an honest look at what we have and have not accomplished during our time of stewardship so that we can learn from our successes (limited though they may be) and failures.
Then we should acknowledge our failures, confess them to the younger generation and invite them to join us in a dialogue of learning and visioning. If we all can learn from the mistakes of the last 30 years, there can be hope that the younger generation will be less pessimistic about the future and more inclined to search for solutions to the world's problems. And my generation can feel at least a little bit better about itself.
