Ok Boomer

Though Jeff and I are FB friends and tend to lean the same direction politically, we often clash. It’s like we are both on the same team but choose to shout at each other from different ends of the bench. We have engaged in heated and sometimes hurtful exchanges.

I ran across this Facebook meme on the left on Jeff’s page. It asks an unrelated question based on suppositions not even alluded to in the body of the rant. 

A 26 year old millennial is complaining about the planet sized shit bag they are expected to own now that they are productive members of our society. These are predictable complaints with a few new ones I had not considered thrown in for good measure. He is not impressed with what is being handed off. He is in no way indicating his generation would like to die.

I have to agree with him. It must suck to be facing the looming disasters that lurk in the not so distant future. He and his generation will be required to face the many bad results of previous generations’ poor choices and lousy stewardship of the planet.

So, rather than get huffy over the fact they are casting their evil eye on me, the Boomer who is leaving them the shit show of their futures, I just smile and nod my head. They are right to be pissed, put upon, and letdown.  It seems to be one of the predictable results for every generation to be disappointed in the generations that preceded them. They are wrong though if they feel they are the only generation to inherit dangerous problems and headaches.

The World and all that is in it has always been a dangerous place. There will never be an end to the disasters, mayhem, and mistakes waiting in the shadows to take us out.  Human kind has always been its own worst enemy. That will never change. Every generation is faced with challenges they either choose to address or ignore.  Most seem to take on a few yet kick the can down the road on others unless that problem has become too prominent and full of disaster to not address.

My generation addressed many wrongs back in the day.  Sadly, many of the wrongs and world ills they at least identified became nothing more than guilty footnotes instead of positive action.  Like the many generations before them, my generation aged out of idealistic youth and was forced to face Reality full on. The “what we should be doing stuff” was relegated to guilty after thoughts overshadowed by meeting mortgages and raising the generational ingrates of the future.  It is a never-ending loop humans cannot escape.  We cannot expect to get off scot free when the kids we weaned grow up and see us for who we really are, flawed and not the pinnacles of stability they knew us to be when they were eight.

Regardless, I am more optimistic now than I was 30 years ago about a generation and the one following it.  Finally after a blank of 60 years since Boomers actually did work for positive change, Millennial’s and the younger Gen Z kids seem to be as serious about how screwed up the world is as I was when I was their age.

The world I lived in when I was 26 seemed just as hopeless at times as it does now. And by all accounts, it has not gotten better. But that is Life sometimes. To survive, we have to dig in while we bitch and complain.  The rule is piss and moan all you want, just do not give up.

I look at living as a battle to defeat Life and the inevitable misery that is part of it.

Keep it ‘tween the ditches …………………………….