The Baby Boomer experience hasn’t been the same across the world but, due to globalization, you, the next generations, share much more, experience wise, than what we did. Frustration, that is.
Having said that, I don’t think that blaming us, your ‘parents’, for everything you have to put up with, will solve much.
First of all, let me explain what I mean by Baby Boomers having experienced different things across different parts of the world.
Actually, it is fairly obvious that the American Baby Boomers had it differently than the Western European ones and that the Eastern Europeans had the almost opposite experience from the first two.
The American Baby Boomers had been raised by the absolute victors of the WWII, the Western European ones by those who had been saved – from both war and the subsequent misery, by the Americans while the third category had been ‘eased into the world’ by people freshly fitted with the communist yoke.
Yet the X-ers and the Milennials have a very common Weltanschauung, on both sides of the Atlantic.
The Internet explains only half of what’s going on. Yes, the ‘coordination’ that bind all the X-ers and the Millennials has happened through the Internet but is due to the entire Euro-Atlantic region being under the same ‘spell’.
And You, X-ers and Milennials, blame us, Baby Boomers, for the present situation.
Which, in a way, makes a lot of sense.
As a matter of fact, I, and many around me, used to put a lot of blame on our parents for the damages inflicted on all of us by the onset of communism in Romania.
Then I realized three things.
That it could have been far worse.
That each generation has to face the mistakes committed by previous one but tends to brush aside the accomplishments inherited from their parents.
The biggest of which, Baby Boomer accomplishments, being the fact that we have somehow managed to keep ‘cool’ the WW we have inherited from our parents.
OK, unlike our parents, we’ve somehow ‘lost the peace’… that’s on us, indeed.
Those who had won the WWII had been wise enough to help the nations which had happened to be on the losing side. Which process didn’t take place – not on the same scale, anyway, after the fall of the Iron Curtain.
Those who had lost the WWII had been wise enough to learn something from being fooled into following the fake prophets that had brought them so much misery. And to assume their part of the blame. Again, this has yet to happen in the former communist countries.
And the third thing that I’ve learned is that no generation, however enlightened, will ever be able to stray very much from the previous one. It can, sometimes, understand and avoid a few of the mistakes committed in the past but will always be ‘tugged back’ by the ‘ways of the past’.
Is there any way out of this historical ‘vicious circle’? Preferably one that will conserve the benefits brought about by the virtuous circle spinning in parallel with the vicious one?
I’m afraid there’s no ‘one size fits all’ remedy.
Each generation has to open their collective mind and select what to take over and what to fix from what they have inherited from their parents.
Specially now, when so much of the whole world is almost in ‘sync’.
nicichiarasa 