Friday, August 13, 2010

Boomers and Our Kids

To complicate the emergent emergency, we do not find ourselves in an era of international trust and good feeling, though after the defeat of the Soviets one might have expected we would. I attribute this largely to a tragic failure of leadership by my own (boomer) generation in the western countries. We made great breakthroughs in music, cinema and technology, we finally brewed some decent coffee and beer in America, we trashed the landscape and we kept on making enemies and starting wars. Not what I, for one, was hoping for.

And my suspicion is that we made a successor generation that, while to our credit is kind and creative and empathetic, seems to me passive and intellectually lazy and defeatist.

If there is hope, I do not think it will come from the west. But the rest of the world lacks our creativity. So it doesn't look pretty.

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