WHAT'S HAPPENING?

When I was young we used to ask that question as an informal greeting. We didn’t give the question or receive the answer tendered by our friend much thought.  Now, as we have grown older, if we ask that question not as a greeting, but in sincerity and really try to find out we will find the answer disquieting. America is beginning to look nothing like the America of the recent past.

America is in the throes of a demographic transformation. Huge generational gaps have opened up in our political and social values, our economic well-being, our family structure, our national racial and ethnic identity, our gender norms, our religious life, and our technology use. Our present is marked by the most striking social, racial, and economic shifts the country has seen in a half-century.

Today’s Millennials are well-educated in terms of technical expertise but when they step off the campus whether as a graduate or a dropout many find they are still unemployed, still dependent, unmarried, lacking religious faith, and the American Dream has become, for them, very dim.  They have to settle for becoming underemployed and are finding they are becoming the first generation in American history to have a lower standard of living than their parents; and they are historically illiterate.  Meantime, on the other end of the generational spectrum our researchers say that currently well over 10,000 Baby Boomers are retiring every single day, most of them not as well prepared financially as they’d hoped, and many are now reaping the consequences of poor health practices choices of their younger years. These generational and social changes are contributive in polarizing our people.

People are struggling, and emotional depression is increasing.

Every aspect of our demography is being fundamentally transformed.  Our population is rapidly becoming non-white, and our median age will soon edge above 40—both unprecedented milestones in our nation and in other ‘developed’ nations.  It is not so with the ‘developing’ nations: they are younger and darker and hungrier and want what we have—or had.  

  

My take? We as a people need to get our moral, religious and social values back on track to mend the breech.  We need to restore the foundational pillars that have been yanked out if we hope to get out of free-fall. The government cannot do it for us. 

To address just one of the ‘pillars’: when I went to school in the ‘60’s we talked about a ‘Social Contract.’ This was an age-old compact—parents (must) take care of children and children (should) take care of parents.  Every society and each family has an unspoken covenant between the generations—I care for you when you’re young; you care for me when I’m old.  Support flows toward need.  There needs to be generational fairness—it is not all ‘take’ and no ‘give.’ We have a shared and mutually influenced destiny--or could have--but sometimes we forget that.

Conclusion:  We should more willingly try to get along with and serve one another. Elders should do a better job inculcating traditional historical, cultural, and religious values to our young. 

All generations see the world through a lens shaped by the ups and downs of their own life. Some gain wisdom from their own experiences, but fewer, unfortunately, of those who preceded them.  The young hopefully will appreciate that experience—the experience of their elders—has value and can help bring us back.

Our (my) generation’s last big mission might be to help rebuild the citadel for today’s young by starting to rebuild the pillars. Without that, what will our children’s inheritance really be?  A Greek proverb says that societies become great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they will never sit in.

  

Cultural and social expectations enforced by custom, convention, traditional civic and family values or conscience are cracking.  We need to fill the cracks with the cement of moral virtue.  Identify what those virtues are (and you won’t find them on ‘Dancing with the stars’). Talk with your elders and look in the history books and the world’s great literature if you are serious about restoring this country’s greatness. Answers can be found there.

We all have an obligation to do our part to get things back on track.