Cha-Cha-Cha-Changes

Yes, I’ve lived a good life. I’ve lived in a safe neighborhood, had a long career that I was good at, had plenty of food and lots of attention. I can’t complain.

But listening to the children, I haven’t done enough.

When I say “I” I mean “We” the Baby Boomers haven’t done enough.

After our parents won a World War, our country bloomed into over excessive indulgence and “We” all enjoyed our privileged lives. “We” had public education (separate, but equal), countrywide transportation, department stores, television, telephones (from party lines to cell phones), computers, clean streets, police, EMS, churches and breweries on every corner.

When a president was assassinated, got a couple of days out of school. When a preacher was shot or a candidate for president was shot or a president quit or protesting students shot or boxes of soldiers sent home or all the rest of the newspaper headlines that faded away with the nightly entertainment and TV dinners. Only when the towers came down did we come out of our haze of global consequences.

So through the years of business expansion from automobiles to refrigerators to real estate spreading across the farm lands with driveways and backyard pools, the poles and lines and concrete paving of paradise and bulldozed forest to displacing our neighbors for a patch of green lawn “We” forgot what our children will endow.

“We” might have felt the last of the hippie smoke or got sucked into the corporate temptation for more cars in the driveway and bigger television screens. Rome had the same problem.

So “Boomers” while we were enjoying ourselves, we forgot about the children. All the plastic and the trash and the air pollination and traffic jams and violent society and dysfunctional political structure, “We” stumbled.

Now the children are saying, “I didn’t agree to be born to a dying planet” and what can we say? “We” have been called and we have no excuse.

Would you give up your automobile(s)? Would you shut down your air conditioning and open your windows? Would you tear up your lawn for a flower garden?

Probably not, but the next generation will not have so many babies or buy a car. Still they will have to deal with our mess.

“How Dare You”