My wife and I migrated into the discussion on guns we are having right now as a society. I had broken down or felt the urge to comment on a friends post and it was an instant mud pit, with the insults, ad hominem attacks and insinuations. I knew I shouldn’t have indulged in opening the door for it, but I did. My wife and I talked for quite some time while sitting on our deck, we pretty much have the same thoughts on guns and that is by none of my doing. My wife makes up her own mind and I don’t judge or interfere in that. Why would I? I love and cherish the fact that she has different views than I do on some matters because I would hate to have two of me around and just someone substantiating my BS, a yes woman? Not in my life, I, myself like the No women.
She brought up something when I said that it was the kids world now, they understand it better than we think, all of it more than we know. It is their world to make and create now and we should just get out of the way and let them do it. She pointed out that it really is, What would the world look like to a fourteen or fifteen year old? What would it look like to an 18 year old? If I read another post or story about “back in my day” I am going to nut up and make loud noises to make sure people understand. This! All of This! Is not your past! This is the kids now! This is their world and they are not our parents responsibility! They are ours! This irresponsibility in leadership either from the top down or the bottom up in squarely on all of us “adults.”
I grew up with Vietnam on TV every night and the images of the wounded and killed were there for me to see with everyone else. We changed when war was brought into our living rooms and as many asked for it to never happen again, there was a lust in the hearts of others. The children of today don’t know our past, what the world was like or the feelings that we all got after 9/11. They know war and divisiveness, racial tensions and school shootings, this is their reality, don’t give them any crap about your past because that is how we got here. Apparently the very best of our past has left this generation unemployed, under-educated, and with less than a tenth of a glass of water to spend on hope to make it through to adulthood. Toss in the racial divide that they don’t really understand or accept for the most part unless they are trained or taught to be against things. They get this whole humanity business, they understand it better than their parents and all of the adults combined. They know what they need and what the world is going to need, but we keep on trying to stop time to bend it backwards, to try to get a mulligan that is just never going to appear.
Their world is that of force and a hardness because their experiences dictate it. Their parents either hovering wanna be gods to their children, or shepards that let the flock go out and the world to train. There are plenty in between, but they too are usually being pulled quickly into one camp or the other. By either choice or by circumstance, just like the closing of the nineteenth century, a whole generation of children were left to work in the mines and fields and nobody has come for them yet. It is those sad faces of the children we don’t see anymore, they are too focussed on the next heartache, the next shooting, and the next suicide. They are more and more in their safer place behind a few doors with a screen in front of them, but as we all know that world is not safe either. So stuck between the real world and the electronic one, it’s no wonder they don’t want to pick a side, any side, in any of this. The things we produced before are no longer relevant in this time frame in this world. Our best efforts got us here and our children are laughing at us from their death beds.
In a world that is continuously escaping the grasp of the adults, it is high time we ask the kids as to what is going on. Their honesty is today, their facts of life are about today and their tomorrows. The very idea that older generations had the ability, money and power to do something about many of our ills and sat and let them fester? That kind of thinking is not going to go over well with any generation, that kind of scorched Earth policy will leave just that. So why should they trust the adults? Why should they get behind our ideas and our ways of life when they obviously don’t work? They don’t, and we don’t have the answers they need to hear anymore. We have thoroughly broken the planet and the systems of government that is meant to unite us. We have carelessly thrown, and grown our children into martyrs of their parents failings. This is not your world any longer, it is theirs. It is their present and future and it is certainly, not your past.