A Responsibility to the Future
What a bunch of bullshit!! I know that technically that is correct in that as children grow up that they will be the adults of the future and thus more apt to make decisions and actions in the future. Well... no du'h!!
What gets me isn't that it is the kids that we are looking to to save our asses in (fill in the blank here to indicate which field of world-falling-apart that is appropriate), but that we adults are passing the buck off to those kids of the future to do the things that we should be doing now.
I am talking in general here, because it would be too easy to get into tangents on specifics which would do more to focus just on one class of problem instead of looking at the over all situation. This is a matter of needing to look at the overall health of the forest and not the specific condition of one tree. Too often I hear people putting great hope upon the shoulders of juveniles that are too stupid to tie thier own shoes. Our society likes to pretend that the Gen-X (or Gen-Y or Gen-Z or Gen-whatever) are a bunch of brilliant kids who will turn the world into an ecological and socialogical utopia. Now, while there are a few bright kids out there, from my viewpoint and experience, I see those kids as even lazier and more self-centered and yes, more stupid, then my generation, the baby boomers, is/are.
It really makes no sense for us to give up responsibility to a generation that has no idea what responsibility is all about. We are getting older, we have done so much already and we are getting tired. We want someone else to carry the torch, and who else would be the logical ones to do so, then those that we see as "our future"? However, the problem is that we have been taught as a social dictate to treat our children as little adults. To pretend that these kids are amazing and remarkable and undefeated in all that they do. There is no last place. There are no losers in this generation! Every person that shows up gets a prize, every contestant is a winner, no matter how long it took them to finish (if indeed they did finish at all).
Does it make sense for us to put so much of our social and planetary socio-eco-political health upon these kids that have no idea what failure is all about? Will they that have never experience true discipline for their errors be able to have the self-discipline to make those sacrifices needed for the betterment for thier city or county or country or planet, if they have always looked to thier parents to turn away from needed discipline for thier own betterment??
I have seen parents refusing to spank a child for stealing, and who have encouraged thier children to lie by setting an example of lying themselves. We have told these kids that if they failed in tests, that it is not thier fault for not studying or our faults for not making them study, but the teachers and the schools fault for giving them tests that are "too hard" or are not devises correctly for the students particular economical/social standing. Each passing year these scores get lower and the students read at a lower and lower grade level. But we still give them blue ribbons and happy faces for "positive self fulfillment".
Will the bosses of the future give them happy faces, or fire thier asses when they fuck up because they are too stupid to do what thier job function is because they have had thier parents do thier homework for them in the past? Will the financial companies of the future give them a blue ribbon, or repo thier house and car because thier parents are no longer there to pay for the kids way when they are out of "the nest" and on thier own, as they have always depended on them to do while they were living at home (till 18 or 25 or 30 years old???)?
No, the kids are not our future. I am the future. George Bush is the future. Keith Olberman is the future. Reggie Bush is the future. You are the future. Some people are good for our future, and some aren't that good, and some are pretty damn bad for our future! But the fact remains that there is no one generation that is more important then the other for the future, because the future IS now. The future isn't in 2010 or at 3:30pm or on Thursday or in March. The future isn't in a week or a month or a year. The future starts the second that you exhale, the moment that you decide that your NOW is now past. Your future starts the instant that you make a deterimination to do something, and that something then becomes your NOW, and when that thing is done, it is your past.
Life is a circular motion where the past and the present and the future are constantly in motion and in flux, hand in hand with life and death. It is not something that we can just hand off to someone else to live for us, or to fix for us. If we fuck something up, it is up to us to fix it, and as soon as we can, not hope that our children or grandchildren (or heaven forbid, great-grandchildren or great-great-grandchildren) to fix it. Because by then, it will be too broken TO fix. Perhaps, there will be NO world for that great-grandchild.
Something to think about.
(Originally posted September 26, 2006 in my Yahoo 360 blog)
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