Tag Archives: great recession

Shot Across my Boomer Bow

I think there are way too few conversations going on between us Baby Boomers and our kids’ generation about our commonalities and areas of divergence and friction. Given that, when our young adult son Eric posted a link on Facebook the other day with the following intro…

Everyone should read (and share) this. Everyone.

Followed by posting a provocative quote from the linked piece…

“From every corner of the institutional spectrum, the whole of American society has been rearranged so that the limits of vision coincide exactly with the death of the Boomers.”

I took notice!

Eric, now 26, has emerged from his youth into adulthood as a thoughtful person not prone to hyperbole, and someone I (biased perhaps) would consider a thoughtful spokesperson for his circle of young adult peers and his “Millennial” generation.

Eric’s must read is a piece in the April 2012 edition of Esquire magazine, “The War Against Youth”, by 36-year-old Canadian Stephen Marche, who writes a monthly column for the magazine, “A Thousand Words about Our Culture”.

FYI… Per a short Wikipedia article on Marche, he was a finalist for the 2011 American Society of Magazine Editors award for columns and commentary. Also noted in that article, is that during a Canadian election campaign in October 2010, the Toronto Globe and Mail published online a commentary by Marche where he “effusively taunted a candidate for mayor of Toronto for the man’s obesity”. Assuming both these citations are true, Marche perhaps combines an incisive social criticism with a penchant for anger and at times hurtful words. But given Eric’s nod, I don’t necessarily want to judge the message by the messenger.

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Still Committed to Us and No Them

With the remembrances today of the events of 9/11 a decade ago, I want to call out something that I think is an important part of the continued processing of that event and the path forward from it into a new century of human development. In my previous piece, “Moving Beyond Us and Them to Only Us”, I wrote about what I see as the key transition we humans are going through…

That transition is what I often describe as from “patriarchy to partnership”, or alternatively from “hierarchy to a circle of equals”. If those terms don’t resonate with much meaning for you, maybe our human societal evolution could be described at its most basic as moving from “us and them” thinking towards thinking instead that there is no “them” and there is only “us”.

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Shopped ’til we Dropped

I can’t say I was one of those prescient people who saw the Great Recession coming, but I will tell you that ever since the 1980s, whenever I walked into a mall or shared the freeway with a zillion other cars with just a driver in them (and no passengers), I felt like our culture (at least the urban version in Los Angeles) was profoundly out of balance. It seemed like in the mall ninety percent of the money being spent was for stuff that the buyers did not really need, and on the freeway the same percentage of the gasoline being consumed was beyond what was needed to move all these people from their points A to points B. We were like addicts trying to maintain a high, taking yet another dose at the expense of our health, ever pushing back and even attempting to deny any day of reckoning.

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