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Dear young people…

To be honest, I have to apologize to the youth of the world for the state we find ourselves in. Yes, great things have happened in my lifetime.
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To be honest, I have to apologize to the youth of the world for the state we find ourselves in. Yes, great things have happened in my lifetime.  We watched the fall of the Berlin Wall, and we have taken some steps forward in the progress of human rights, but the legacy of the late baby boomer generation leaves little else that will be celebrated 100 years from now.

Fortunately, it’s not too late to turn things around. Doing so requires that we not only be humble and brutally honest with ourselves, it requires that we pass the wisdom we learned through our mistakes to our sacred young people.

The truth is, we never knew where the truth was and we never bothered to try to find it. Someone said, “Greed is good” and we repeated it. Someone else said, “He who dies with the most toys wins,” and we put it on a bumper sticker.

This resulted in hyper-consumerism. We bought more and more stuff and built bigger and bigger houses so we had room for our useless possessions. We completely ignored warnings to care for the environment or to care for our neighbours.

The truth is, greed is really bad and the only thing that is left behind when you die is your legacy. Greed hurts other people and hollows out our souls.

Money is not a bad thing. Long term capital investment and a win-win attitude create a strong and healthy economy where everyone, everywhere benefits. In order to achieve this, there must be respectful cooperation between business, workers and governments. We need regulations to protect the public because there are unscrupulous businesspeople who will do anything possible to bend the rules to their advantage, regardless of the pain and sickness they cause to others.

Young people, I am so sorry we supported the policies of the Thatcher and Reagan era. The world was doing better for a while and we were making progress. Then we allowed good laws to be sabotaged.  

Don’t believe the promise of prosperity from laissez-faire government policies. The benefits are very short term. They lead to the horrendous income disparity, like that which you find yourselves struggling against today.

The other lie we believed, growing up during the Cold War, was that nothing we did mattered, so why bother? The world could blow up tomorrow, so take all you can today. Even as we watched our sisters and brothers boldly stand up to dictatorships in Eastern Europe, we didn’t walk with them. We heard that there were human rights abuses happening in our sphere of influence, but we turned away and tuned into Cops on our TVs.  

Today the military-industrial complex is so powerful they create their own foreign policies, resulting in millions of unnecessary deaths and millions more refugees fleeing for safety in the midst of a global pandemic.  

There was also a great deal we could have done long ago to stop the climate crisis, but hey, there were great jobs in the oil industry. Why try to take a stand on environmental issues anyhow? Who cares?

I’m sorry to admit it to you, young people, but many of us still don’t care. I know you do. Thank goodness you do.

Dear young people, please learn from the mistakes of my generation.   That voice inside your spirit telling you that you have a purpose to build a better, kinder and more sustainable world is the voice of truth.  

You are a beautiful, wonderful and powerful being.  The world needs you to make a difference, and generations from now the world will look back at the legacy of your generation and say, “Thank goodness you came along.”