Blame the Boomers! This Thanksgiving. Gen Z will be next to blame.

 

Cortland Malloy’s “Gen Z ...dialogue about healing world” hurt by “Boomers” [one day before Thanksgiving in the Washington Post] deserves more attention.  

It was my generation’s refusal to do what was needed that has yielded us the chaos we have today. Young people are absorbing phenomenal amounts of information (good and bad), but the source of their loneliness, depression and anxiety is the result of our culture’s mental adoption of the delusion of independence. It exists nowhere in the known universe.  Certainly not in social species.

We have always had the information needed to unite people.  From prebiblical times to the creation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (75 years ago this Dec 10), and again in the summary of the unanimous conclusion of the 1980 bipartisan Presidential Commission on World Hunger.  It specifically warned ...“The most potentially explosive force in the world today is the frustrated desire of poor people to attain a decent standard of living. The anger, despair, and often hatred that result represent real and persistent threats to international order…this combination of problems now threatens the national security of all countries just as surely as advancing armies or nuclear arsenals.” ... “Most Americans have been conditioned to equate national security with the strength of strategic military forces. [WE] considers this prevailing belief to be a simplistic illusion...” “Military force is ultimately useless in the absence of the global security that only coordinated international progress toward social justice can bring.” And specifically mentioned increases in “diseases”, “international terrorism”, “war”, “environmental problems” and “other human rights problems”.

In 2016 Mikhail Gorbachev wrote on his website "The XXI century will be a century either of total all-embracing crisis or of moral and spiritual healing that will reinvigorate humankind. It is my conviction that all of us - all reasonable political leaders, all spiritual and ideological movements, all faiths - must help in this transition to a triumph of humanism and justice, in making the XXI century a century of a new human renaissance." 

In October of 2021, CISA director Jen Easterly said “Everything is connected, everything is interdependent, so everything is vulnerable.... And that’s why this has to be a more than whole of government, a more than whole of nation [effort]. It really has to be a global effort....”  CISA is the Cyber and Infrastructure Security Agency.  Our nation’s newest federal agency established by the Trump Administration in 2018. 

Unless the Gen Z generation can convince those in power and with unprecedented wealth to achieve the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals by 2030, their generation may be the last chance humanity has of putting our species on the path to a more peaceful, livable, and sustainable future.