If our lives are like candles, I'm pretty close to being little more than a wick. Great thing about hindsight, it's always 20./20 whether you choose to see what it is revealing or not.
I was born before we elected Eisenhower as President. These days, he wouldn't get the time of day from the party he led at the time. Sic tramsit gloria, I guess. Struggled to put on a new T-shirt this morning with a tag that told me it was "Made in Vietnam," and going back more than half a century, I'm surprised I survived the world I grew up in.
I came of age with the War in Vietnam, not that I was anywhere near at risk. Fifty-eight thousand (plus) US military casualties and hundreds of thousands of damaged and destroyed lives later, we in the Land of the Round Doorknobs had our precious Peace with Honor. And those of us who were Baby Boomers, both the old enough to serve in the killing fields and those young enough to only watch it on TV, returned to our lives, already in progress.
We, the privileged who remained safe as houses on these shores, blamed our parents' generation and more ominously, those who bore arms in that conflict, for "the war" (the definite article, even then, made me wince). I was shocked--ashamed more than shocked--to eavesdrop on a conversation among service men and women the age of our two adult children recently on Facebook in which they, who have done an inordinate amount of the fighting and dying for almost the last decade in places the rest of us cannot find, turned their gaze on MY generation.
Not very pretty, but I fear, pretty accurate. My cohorts and I were described as the 'most self-centered people to ever walk the planet' with an indictment citing 'their exaggerated sense of self-importance and entitlement is beyond offensive and is why the world they are leaving for us is such a ...(large numbers of Bozo No-No words in combinations I'm not used to reading). I couldn't argue a single point any of the five or six posters made, and after I'd offer, 'but our intentions were good!' I'd have had nothing to say.
We gave the world sex without love or commitment-elevating it to a recreational (if not circus-like) activity that can and often does, when performed unprotected, kill people of every race, creed, and color. We traded blue skies and air you can breathe for BMWs, sub-standard schools, and sub-prime mortgages, then closed our eyes (and held our noses) as we started our descent into the abyss of political and moral bankruptcy.
The children of the Boomers have already started to clean up after their elders, as gargantuan an undertaking as that will prove to be. A chapter of a book on a faraway shelf has come to a close, but the story goes on, because, as a nation, so, too, must we.
-bill kenny
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