Through the Generations

There was an interesting article/editorial in last Friday's FT on the tension between youth and baby boomers. It left out the other "challenge" to baby boomers-taking care of their parents, but in a tongue-in-cheek sort of way addressed the very real friction between generations.

Of course there has always been a generational divide between parents and offspring so it is not as if the article had touched on anything truly earth shattering. It did try and address the sense that much of today's youth seems to feel that their parent's generation happily despoiled the environment in the course of becoming the "me" generation.

It is always interesting to me how we all seem to think that the degradation of the environment is a new phenomenon. Now I don't wish to get embroiled in a major discussion on the damage that humankind has done/is doing to the environment. The state of the environment is catastrophic.

But it is a result of human development. It is somewhat like warfare. We have been killing each other for ever. It is just that relatively recently we became much more technologically advanced and so now can kill much more efficiently. We aren't better or worse-just more competent.

That is where we are with our environment as well. We trash it in the name of progress-something we have always done, but now are much more "efficient" at so doing which is bringing us closer to a tipping point.

So it not strange that at many dinner tables there are discussions as to what we as baby boomers did, and how our children's generation will have to pay the butcher's bill, in almost every sense one would like to imagine. It is therefore not strange that there is resentment, even anger.

But here again it is not that new. Traditionally having many children was amongst other things a form of ensuring that one was cared for in infirmity. It was just part of the cycle. With changes in technology the concept of "caring" has changed, but not the need. The inter linkage of the generations is a fact, and where there is contact, there is abrasion.

And of course this is all happening as our children are becoming young adults themselves and looking at their futures, with all the hopes and fears that we have all had to endure as we were growing up.

It is a daunting prospect. And when the weight of environmentalism, the cost of "national debt" and the desire/need to forge one's position in the world all converge it creates stress and fissures.

As a parent one oscillates between trying to live one's own life as well as trying to support one's children morally, psychologically and yes, financially without either becoming too overbearing or too distant.

It is not easy. Nobody "asked" to be born, and yet here we all are.