Lost....
“Every generation
Blames the one before
And all of their frustrations
Come beating on your door”
I was born at the tail end of the ‘baby-boomers’. On the cusp so to speak. Sometimes that’s a frustrating position to be in. I was never quite old enough to enjoy all the freedoms of their adolescence and reactions and change were already setting in by the time I was. Yet now I’m old enough to be vilified along with them as the next generation attempts to wrestle control from their hands. I suppose it doesn’t really matter for I have never understood the need to classify millions into such rigidly defined categories anyhow.
“I know that I'm a prisoner
To all my father held so dear
I know that I'm a hostage
To all his hopes and fears”
Having said that, it is undeniable that each generation not only blames the one before for the insoluble problems it inherits, but also faces unique problems of its own that will inevitably lead to their solutions being castigated in turn. And as our world grows more complex, more involuted and tortured, I fear that each new generation is faced with an entirely new array seemingly far more insurmountable.
“So we open up a quarrel
Between the present and the past
We only sacrifice the future
It's the bitterness that lasts”
As a mother of two teenagers, I have been particularly blessed ( and here I scramble to touch wood, cross fingers, pat bunnies’ feet and do whatever else is necessary not to tempt fate.) Both the Boy Genius and Serenity had a very laid-back approach to adolescence and all its feral hormones. I have been lucky. But that doesn’t make me any less worried about the world they’re about to inherit. As all parents do, I know I have to learn how to step back and allow them to find their own path through the pressures and pitfalls that await them on the path to adulthood. I know they will do so, though it may not be in the way I would choose.
“So don't yield to the fortunes
You sometimes see as fate
It may have a new perspective
On a different day
And if you don't give up, and don't give in
You may just be okay.”
Yet as a teacher, married to a teacher, I know that some don’t make it through okay. He came home from work shattered yesterday. The school captain had died the night before. On Thursday at school he was his usual exuberant popular self, on Thursday night he was dead. Though it will never be reported as such, it appears to have been at his own hand. And the world seems a colder, harsher place than it was. He was not family, but as teachers, he still was ‘ours.’ So we stumbled through a night where we questioned a world that fails such children. How is it we cannot see these things coming, cannot let them know that such things as the loss of a driving licence, the missing of an assessment task are trivial, unimportant things? That there is always a new perspective to be found?
My heart weeps for his family, and I hold my own close.