When the tribes of NW Canada assembled to discuss and decide issues, they had a respected elder to represent and speak for the interests of the seventh generation. To consider the future, and make sure decisions made today did not disadvantage all those future generations. Our present leaders and institutions lack that foresight. The political cycle is reduced to a few years of pork-barreling promises that can’t be kept. Get in power, blame the previous government for failure to deliver, run up deficits, then try and get re-elected.
I am of the baby boomer generation, which seems to be a bit schizophrenic. We pioneered the love and peace thing and were empowered by our parents as generation who were not just expected to be seen and not heard. We embraced love and ethics, not money as the most important thing, then devolved into the most rapacious generation ever in the exploitation of the planet for money. We evolved the present economic system which thrived on our consumption running up huge debts to be paid for by the next generation. We trashed the planet and loaded it with our refuse. Now we expect to be paid a pension funded by the people we have robbed. But hey, we might even be able to get away with it as we have the political system pretty well sewed up and the financial system in our pockets.
That sounds very cynical. Well yes, it is. My generation stepped away from the ideals it espoused, and turned out to be the most environmentally destructive ever. I guess part of the problem was that only a tiny fraction of my generation ever had these egalitarian and environmental ideals. They were just emblematic and featured in the media characterisation, but the vast majority of my generation just got on with business as usual. I thought a real revolution was going on. I am hugely disappointed.
Below you see me with my grandson Philip born a couple of weeks ago.
Looking to the future
I had just lectured him on the weirdness of quantum mechanics and particle entanglement, but fatigue overtook him before I could introduce Pauli’s uncertainty principal or Schrodinger’s wave equations. It doesn’t matter , as my droning voice is comfort enough. I am pursuing a policy that I had with my children. That the content didn’t matter, but the contact and engagement did. When my kids were young, I read to them from the complete works of Shakespeare. The book was very big and it was cheap. I guess the copyright has run out. I read to them before they were born, and I read to them before they could understand. The rhythm and cadence of the Shakespeare’s words are beautiful. It was just the time spent with them and sounds they heard that were important.
By less than a year old, they are picking up on meaning , vocabulary and story, and you have to abandon Shakespeare and go to animal stories. Maybe, a couple of decades later, they will pick up on Shakespeare.
I loved reading to my children. I hope you do too.
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