My first thought after hearing of the Boston Marathon bombings was about a fear that’s been on my mind a lot lately: What kind of world are we leaving our grandchildren?
Between hideous acts of foreign and domestic terrorism, steady economic decline, the grim reality of global warming and political gridlock, their future seems perilous.
When I was a child, terroristic acts such as Boston, Newtown, Oklahoma City or 9/11 would have been unthinkable; most Americans lived safe lives.
That was before a tumultuous half-century that encompassed the Cuban missile crisis, the assassinations of the Kennedy brothers and Martin Luther King Jr., a string of bloody and costly foreign military misadventures and a turn to poisonous discord in national affairs.
As politics degrade to the point that compromise is a dirty word and the only acceptable outcome is complete capitulation of the other side, it’s inevitable that some on the edge will see bombs as the only way to settle differences.
As our military endlessly polices faraway places we don’t understand and don’t have sufficient interest to justify the blood we spill, it’s inevitable that foreign terrorists will plot to bring the bloodshed to our soil.
Folks my age are living out our days as members of perhaps the most privileged generation ever.
After our grandparents beat back the Great Depression and our parents triumphed in World War II, there was nothing ahead of us but opportunity, and for the most part we prospered.
But we didn’t pay it forward to our kids and grandkids; they’ll be the first American generations that won’t have it better than their parents.
It’s because my generation hogged all the natural resources for ourselves, ran up unsustainable debt that our kids and grandkids will pay for one way or another and ignored warnings about dangers to the environment until it was too late to act effectively.
We’ve worshipped at the altars of self-righteousness, NIMBYism and greed. Despite the early idealism of my generation, little of the enormous wealth we’ve produced in the past 50 years has gone to raising up the least fortunate among us.
Now we’re dangerously close to seeing it all come crashing down on our children and grandchildren before they have a chance to enjoy the American dream that our parents and grandparents worked so nobly to leave to us.
The carnage in Massachusetts is horrific in its own right, but it’s also part of a bigger and ongoing American tragedy.
As we try to take some kind of meaning from it, a good start would be to wake up every morning and ask ourselves, What will we do today to change the trend line and make a better life for our grandchildren?
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Reach David Shapiro at volcanicash@gmail.com or blog.volcanicash.net.
