Madison Avenue has a hell of a lot to answer for. They spend a huge amount of money every day to convince you that black is white and wrong is right. ‘Don’t drink tap water – ugh! Drink bottled water, instead.’ Wrong. ‘SUVs are better than station wagons.’ No, they’re not. ‘You deserve to retire at 40!’ What? ‘Fat makes you fat.” No, that’s sugar. And on and on and on. And you believe everything they tell you. Stop it. They’re lying to you. Think for yourself.
My bone of contention today is a phrase that nearly everyone would agree with (which is part of the problem) – “the children are our future”. No, they’re not – at least not in the way that’s commonly understood. In the sense that children are the next wave in the human race, I would agree. But most people, I think, don’t interpret it that way. The most common interpretation would probably be: we can’t find our way out of these problems, but here come the future Einsteins and Lincolns – they’ll solve this. That’s just passing the buck. It’s the same damn cowardly knee-jerk refusal to face your own problems as your parents did to you and your grandparents did to them. ‘These problems are too big, I’m too busy, I don’t really care – let’s hand it off to the kids. It’s their problem now.’ And Madison Avenue is also responsible for this.
People are quick to point out that even Socrates groused about the younger generation and how they were spoiled, soft and lacked discipline. It’s a common old-guy gripe. But it’s only been in my lifetime that the concept of a Generation Gap reared its ugly head. It may have been popularized by political pundits, but it was created by advertisers. Youth Culture is a sales tool. Our ideas about the schism between the old and the young were bought and paid for and handed to us as if they were self-evident truths. You’ve been swindled. There’s nothing overwhelmingly good or bad about any generation – people don’t really change all that much from century to century. Political parties come and go, countries rise and fall, technologies advance and then are replaced – but people and their basic needs never really change. We forget this.
People also forget that it’s the responsibility of the older generation – the ones with all the money and the political power – to work on and hopefully solve every problem they can touch. Not so they can lord it over the youngers, but so they can hand off a better world to their children. Instead, they seem to want to hunker down and protect their own gains, and let the kids deal with ‘the problems of the future’. The kids have their own future to deal with, one we’ll never see. The future we see now is our problem. The problems staring at us right now – the racism, political uncertainty and economic madness – those are for us to deal with. And yes, in many ways those were handed to us by our elders, because they also believed the lie. But if we hand them off to the young to solve, we increase their burden, we set them up for failure. This is grossly unfair. And what the hell do we know about the future, anyway?
For all our vaunted intelligence and abilities, humans are horribly short-sighted. We romanticize the past and call it the Good Old Days, we recoil from the future as if it were the antechamber to Hell. The past was just as screwed up as the present, but we forget that. We choose to believe that somehow everything was simpler and better and sweeter back then. It wasn’t. We look at the future and are so myopic that we can only imagine a glittering Star Trek world or a dystopia that would make the Walking Dead look tame. You can’t change the past, no matter how much you want to – but the future is still unwritten. Maybe that’s why we’re terrified. The future appears to most people like this immense dark nothing – truly ‘an undiscovered country’ to borrow from Will – a place where the only thing we know for certain is that we’ll grow old and die and leave our children to carry on. Horrifying image, right?
It doesn’t have to be. The future can be anything we want it to be – we simply have to step up and make it. The news media throws all kinds of terror, greed and suffering into our faces every day – believe it or not, that’s their job. (I’ll talk about this again.) But all that nastiness is not the whole story. There are people out there right now trying to clean up the oceans and the land, other people working hard to keep you healthy and safe, still others are working to get nations and groups to talk to each other rather than fighting. We don’t hear much about any of that. You may think, “I’m just one person, what can I hope to do?” The answer is: do whatever is right in front of you, do what’s right, do it now. Just as little changes in habit can make you healthier, wealthier and smarter, the little things you do for others add up. You can actually help change the world.
The alternative, of course, is to do nothing. But if you do that, then you leave the future in the hands of others who are willing to do something. Are you sure you want that? If you leave the future in the hands of the loudest, pushiest people, you get more of the madness we see all around us. Instead, do what you can, wherever you can – and leave your children a better future. Also – teach them to do the same for their own children. Our world depends on this – and so does the future. Create the future you want to see.
Be well.
TGC