THEY DIDN’T MEAN TO, BUT THE BOOMERS ARE HANDING DOWN TO YOU A PLANET IN VERY POOR CONDITION, A STAGGERING POLITICAL CHALLENGE, AND NO PLAN.

Every parent wants their child to grow into the world with open eyes and confidence. But every parent also wants the child to live without fear, in a world the parent knows grows ever more fearful. Every child can read their parents’ uneasiness trying to explain things like where babies come from and what happens when we die. The little terrors of the teen years, for all generations, stem from the contradictions: Each child wants to be recognized as an adult, wants to have the powers and freedom of an adult, yet also fears the responsibilities and dangers of the adult world, and sometimes wants to be a baby again. The parents feel the contradiction as a desire for the child to be grown and gone, mixed with an abiding urge always to protect and nurture.

These contradictions don’t scale up very well at all. Because adults in groups have a dangerous tendency to think and act, unwittingly and unconsciously, like teenagers: willful, selfish, defensive, aggressive and inconsistent. And the society-as-parent cannot address this contradiction without opening a public discussion of the failures of the “adult” society. At the turning of the age, this is one view of our dilemma.

Three generations span the WWII survivors and the boomers grown up. They ... we, are having a very hard time trying to figure where we went wrong, how bad we’ve let it get, whether to admit any of it, and how to hand the world off to the Next Generation without an overlay of denial or an undercurrent of despair.

THE END OF PRE-CIVILIZATION

We grown-ups mostly like to think we have created a civilization, or live in one and are preserving it.
Assuming the history of this period gets written, the causes and severity of the downside will have to be documented. The unregulated industrialization, indiscriminate greed and willful ignorance of these generations have undone most of the so-called progress. And the ensuing state of the world - planet and human-made culture - is far from civilized. War and the wealth gap and the general failure of education, in the U.S. in particular, look more like barbarity in some kind of clownish disguise.

A good parent provides the nurture, security and guidance to prepare the child for the pitfalls we all must face. And responsible parents want to leave a legacy no worse than the one they inherited. But industrial civilization has failed on both counts. Where is the cognitive divide between personal parenting and the culture-as-parent?

Most good parents manage intuitively to transcend (in their parenting at least) their unconscious fears and desires. But the public culture has much more trouble recognizing, acknowledging or moderaing them. We're uncomfortable bringing out our dirty laundry, even though we all have it.

The next step toward a mature and responsible civilization will require this intuitive leap: wrapping our rational heads around our irrational motivations. But it will have to be discussed and decided upon in the public discourse. It can obviously NOT be trusted to take care of itself.

THE RECKONING

We are stuck at the last stage of pre-civilization. We know what it’s supposed to look and feel like. We believe we’ve achieved it because pieces of it obviously exist. But we are loath to admit the mistakes and shortcomings that are so deeply embedded in our progress. And, a little like the discomfort the parent feels, with the child at the threshold of adulthood, we are in deep denial about how far our culture has to go to realize a stable, sustainable, civil global society.

Intelligence has a down-side when unconscious fear and desire prevent self-doubt, self-questioning and true cooperation from moderating arrogance, ignorance and greed. In individuals, but also in a powerful, money-driven culture, in spades.

The right-wing Teabagger loons are right to fear the U.N., a “globalized” society, and the loss of U.S. sovereignty to the will of other nations. Because that is exactly where we must be headed if we are to negotiate this next step. If we can negotiate it with conscious intent, democratic principles, sustainable goals and clear-eyed foresight, it will be a win win win win win win win situation.

They are right to dread the specter of “Socialism” because the truth will out. The “Economic Justice” (read ‘the new Socialist’) movement and the Environmental Justice movement have their histories, their causes and their goals in complete, coherent alignment. Reining in outlaw Capitalism, taming our destructive instinct to war, and reclaiming the environment are all parts of the only path to a just, sustainable and mature civilization.

 

... WILL HAVE A DEEP SENSE OF CONNECTION TO ALL OTHER PEOPLES, ALL LIVING THINGS, AND THE HEALTH OF THE BIOSPHERE. AND WITH THAT, PEACE.

Even were it not for the global eco-crisis, the generation entering adulthood in this decade would face challenges as great as any in the last century. The speed of change in the culture is a significant factor. This problem, like so many others, is made worse by the “this is water” factor.

From David Foster Wallace’s speech with that title: Two young fish are swimming along happily. A wizened older fish passes by, “Mornin’ kids, how’s the water?” The two younger fish swim on for a few minutes in silence, then one asks the other, “What’s water?”

There is a whole array of factors that have been present throughout our lives, to the point we don't notice them, take them completely for granted. We assume they are simply part of the reality in which we are all embedded. Generation Next has adapted to an information environment that seems virtually infinite. The paradox is that access to such a broad array of electronic data, and to a virtual social circle that’s surfing that same array, makes it ever the more difficult: to prioritize, to find information relevant to one’s “real” life, to keep attention focussed for more than a few minutes, to learn or make judgements in the context of “real world” experience, to build a coherent view of how the actual world works, or to understand that this window is biased, heavily edited, and that these conditions that seem normal are actually revolutionary, and will have completely unpredictable long-term consequences.

The paradox of the “conceptual emergency” is that the same “progress” that has depleted and poisoned the planet has also made it nearly impossible for young people to acquire the in-depth knowledge or to make “informed” decisions about the world whose citizens they are.

A brilliant teacher of Industrial Design addresses students with shorter and shorter attention spans, and with stiffer assumptions about how stable their world is. He keeps repeating, in different contexts, with different projects, toward different objectives, “No we have to re-think EVERYTHING, including the way we think about THIS” (whatever it is). “By the time most designers finish Step 1. they have made unconscious mistakes that will doom their project. We have to be able to take a step back and examine the assumptions that lead to Step 1.”

To reshape the thinking that can lead to the creation of a sustainable economy, Gen Nexters will have to be prepared to question and re-examine EVERYTHING they think they know. This seems like it can only lead to mental paralysis and decision gridlock. Not unlike our Congress. If we literally have to reexamine every decision as we’re about to make it, we’ll never make another decision.

But if we prioritize decisions that lead to consumption, to purchases, to the uses of technology, to the “disposal” of waste, we can imagine that the exercise might lead to a different image of the self, a different view of the world, and a different world.

THE RECKONING ...

... for Gen Nexters will come in several phases. The first and most difficult will be to recognize “the water” - the conditions of the world that we take for granted that are parts of the problem. It may mean re-learning U.S. history, like in “A People’s History ...” It may require dealing with the technology addictions they have but don’t notice. It will involve establishing a different relationship with the things they put in their bodies, and with the things they throw away.

These attitude adjustments may be facilitated by - who woulda thought? - conversations with those in the older generations who have begun to make the mental and behavioral adaptations.

Perspective and a sense of proportion, between the virtual or symbolic and the “real” or experiential worlds, are the hardest conceptual challenges. Language and numbers give us the sense that we understand concepts like trillions of dollars extracted from the economy, or billions of years of evolution, but the “understanding” is mostly illusion.

Visiting a city dump or a landfill, or a slaughterhouse or a prison, can bring some perspective. Saving all the plastic you would throw away in a month, in a closet for example, will bring a sense of proportion. Experiencing exactly how much time, sun, water and care it takes to grow a tomato or a bunch of spinach is a small education in itself. Baking bread, or trying to, can be very humbling. These kinds of experiences can help point to “the water.”

The Next Generation, in the U.S. in particular, will face the biggest challenges in re-imagining, re-learning and re-building that any people anywhere have ever faced. EVER. Only earthquake, hurricane and flood survivors who have the courage to rebuild face such readical shifts in their views of the world.

Today's college grads will have to reconstruct the education system and its essential content. They will have to re-learn how to learn, and then teach the generation following them. They will watch, understand, then pitch in and help as entire sectors of the economy evaporate and are recycled into new industries and services. They will grow and cook more of their own food. They’ll learn how to build and fix the things that hands and hand tools can still shape.

They’ll see every dollar of income and every dollar spent as a an atom in a global economy that will be organized around a different set of principles: fairness, social benefit and sustainability.

If they have children they will decide to have one or two at the most. If they can function in society without owning a motor vehicle they will. If they have to buy or lease a car, they’ll choose wisely and expect to use the same one for a longer period of time.

They will gradually learn to appreciate the rhythms of nature and hope that they stay stable enough to support their activities. They’ll slow down in many aspects of their lives and learn to appreciate both, fast-moving information and long, slow transitions. They’ll readjust their attention spans, ideally through building and making and repairing and growing the things that take a lot of patience, perseverance and foresight.

With any luck, by the time they reach middle age, they will have to study history, read novels, see old documentaries, and ask their elders what it was like to live in a society that wasted so flagrantly yet allowed homelessness and starvation, or what it was like to live with the threat of war. Because those errors will have been corrected.

Having seen the environmental devastation their parents and grandparents allowed, they will watch local ecosystems, superfund sites, dead zones and the residue of catastrophic oil spills gradually give way to the beautiful resilience of natural systems.

They will vow to teach their children and grandchildren the lessons they have learned and the changes in perspective that have made their lives so much richer and more promising than anything our generation experienced or could have imagined.