The Rich Generation
I am child born of the rich generation, the richest generation that will ever be from the richest country on Earth.
When you, my father, wonder obliquely whether I will be able to retire as richly as yourself, I smile to my self, and answer. No. I shall not be as rich as you, probably neither in terms of money nor in happiness. I am not even certain that a day upon which I might retire will ever come, or if I shall seek it, await it with desire and expectation for hard work done.
Better that I pace my days as if I were to work all my life. For I do not believe that it will be within my possibilities to find a life of luxury at the end of some number of years. It is no longer the world that you saw. It is not truly possible to continue creating increasing generations with ever expanding requirements for natural resources. But this was never a part of your consciousness: it is only an awareness now beginning to possess my own thoughts. To you the world was simple. Glorious free enterprise was there to blaze a way of truth into the future. Hard work and astute business practices were awarded with significant amounts of individual wealth. A Mercedes-Benz was something to aspire to and trips to far away first-world countries. Pollution was something that environmental worry warts dreamed up, not something that would possibly leave your grandchildren with compromised immune systems. Not your grandchildren, not the continuation of a wealthy family's bloodlines.
What you bought was what you could afford and the cost was what it said on the label. That is your concept of the real cost. An honest dollar earned to pay for an honest dollar of goods. The ravaged rain forests are too far away to have meaning, the decline of ecosystems worldwide might mean the loss of some insignificant little creature here and there, but certainly there is nothing in that that can cast doubt upon an entire world economic process. The cars are everywhere, and when Detroit falters America kneels. That this entire global infrastructure built about the automobile might be destined to obsolescence, with no continuation of the privilege to individually travel in one's car to one's private property, is completely unthinkable to you. The recent hundred year floods thrice in ten years and record temperatures repeatedly in the news are difficult to contemplate as unpaid costs of merchandise.
Money was your obvious goal, and it was a source of joy to have it all so clearly defined. You used to iron your dollar bills as a child. Now, the pursuit of money in itself seems too insufficiently comprehensive for me to embrace as simply as you did. There is something about the present state of the world that demands much more than that historically healthy, preoccupation with self-interest. I cannot lucidly define it, cannot pin down my unrest, unease, unsatisfaction. But it has roots in the golf courses that your generation builds for their retirement over the narrows strips of alluvial soil in the deserts that I once farmed with joy in bared feet; in the power of existing wealth to create conceptions and wants in the minds of the many, coaxing them to work so hard to buy the latest style of car when they are a model for the privileged and contrary to any global possibility; in the hypocrisy of a society which fosters on one hand the legal distribution of an addictive drug simply because old money is involved, and on another proclaims the illness and death caused. The list could go on and on.
But is it any different now? Mankind has always been an imperfect evolution towards the future. Surely there cannot be so much change between two generations. We have all the time there is, you would say, although I'm not sure such a statement truly means anything. It has always been competition for the resources of the world, and arms to make that a competition with bite and not just bark. And I think more in cooperation, for if we do not evolve toward a family upon the earth, then will not those whom we ignore in turn diminish our future and perhaps even our present? Am I thinking too far ahead? Or do I correctly perceive the winds of change as a breath upon my neck? Will the approaching necessity when we shall no longer know our wealth as the exhaustion of a capital resource, combine with manifold desire to live a life of greater human fulfillment far from the vicariousness of television? Why am I filled with such relentless desire to find the Way, if desire be not the gift of the Divine?
I am too close to your generation to not know its dreams, to not share them
if only nostalgically. I largely understand where you are coming from, far
more than succeeding generations will. You are the richest generation that
will ever be, and I will at best be part of a transition to another way of
life, to other generations that will look back and perhaps without understanding,
curse both yours and mine.
LinuxOS: Next
Steve Morningthunder