Throughout our recent history as a nation, we have come to glorify the generation that was spawned from World War II as the Greatest Generation, who rose from the ashes of the Great Depression and that horrible war.
When we hear of those times, rarely do we read or hear any sharp negatives about that generation of Americans. Their children (our parents), their grandchildren (us), and their great-grandchildren (some of us here, others children of our own) have been told to glorify and exalt on high this generation of Americans.
Today, I cannot help but feel that many spawned from this generation will look back at it years from now as a generation that spited them with debt, social chaos, and terrorism, out of sheer selfishness and hubris. What we are all witnessing today is the Greatest Generation in Reverse, the GGR, a generation spawned of, by and for Corporate America, a materialistic generation hooked on sound-bites, television, fast-food, and religiosity. It is a generation I cannot help but feel that our children and grandchildren will look upon with deep disappointment, anger, sadness, and, for some, hatred.
The one positive aspect is that many of us in our current generation are slowly starting to wake up and smell the coffee, the latte, or what have you. Our parents are laying the foundation for a massive mess to be cleaned up, one that they, in their own cynical, self-righteous nature, feel we should or don't believe will ever happen because we'll all be dead anyway. It will be a similar, yet more tragic and difficult, mess to clean up than the one left behind by the generation of the Gilded Age.
Our country's arrogance, ignorance, and artificial morality has undone a lot of the basic aspects of our country that helped drive it to become the world's biggest superpower (along with the Soviet Union) after World War II. The biggest being that people of foreign origin no longer find American academics and job opportunities worthwhile, but rather find those in Europe, China, and India much more gratifying and economically affordable. The very thing we are undoing has been one of the key instruments that helped make a lot of today's technological advances, from the dreaded Atomic Bomb to the race to the moon to even the Internet. No doubt, in our regressive society that is forced to catch up, rather than lead, in the technological and academic races, our future generation will look at this one with scorn, wondering how they could be so stupid.
Television may have been a tremendous invention that helped spawn means of communication never thought possible before, but I can't help but feel that today's upcoming generation will be taught to despise television, or worse despise technology in general. Television is easy because it is a medium that I cannot help but feel has had a direct affect on American society, as much in the negative as in the positive. I cannot help but feel that the early inventions of television, with the early Cathode Ray Tubes, were damaging to our senses, and has probably made us less smart as a result.
Computers and the Internet may be the one good aspect of this current generation that our future generation will take and flash a smile. However, as I mentioned before, many may be taught to despise all technology in general, as the tool for Corporate America and that which can destroy the earth as we know it. To see such regression would be a tragedy for our race as much as it would be for our nation, but it seems like a greater chance of that happening, should Corporate America get its greedy paws on the Internet itself. China, as reported earlier on The American Street, says that they have their own version of the Internet that's faster than ours. No doubt it's state-run and probably censored to boot, but that could be our future if we don't stop it, and our current generation of parents and their children are either too blind to see it or too determined to let it happen.
On a side note, for all the talk about teaching creationism rather than evolution, I'm surprised that no one has been able to make clear one argument to that: maybe God would want us to evolve. Think about it, if we didn't evolve in some manner or form, how could we have created computers, the television, airplanes, muskets, swords, plows, even the freakin' wheel?! Besides, I tend to think like this - what a better way to show love to God than to evolve the very creation He first created, to make life easier for it, to make it stronger than before, to make it live longer than before, to advance methods that help repair the creation where it once before could never be repaired. Some would say that is trying to act like God - I think it's a means of showing God great love for the thing that was His greatest creation. That kind of talk could do wonders for the church of today, but I digress...
Today, we are witnessing a massive decline from the age of Enlightenment that spawned forth the very men and women who helped establish this country and its Constitution, the latter of which has become the basic representative tool for every advancing society in the world. It is happening when you have people openly proclaiming that slavery, which most if not all the civilized world has renounced, wasn't as bad as it was and can still do some good, and openly bashing the entire Enlightenment period. Our future generations will no doubt look upon this group of people as the most arrogant, selfish, ignorant, hypocritical, bigoted, and perhaps dumbest generation of Americans in quite some time, a generation that is openly mocked in science fiction novels and shows like Star Trek.
The only thing we do not know is if there will be another generation of Americans and historians who will be around and/or have the tools to write about it. Just like the man who rips off a car door in the movies, this generation does not know its own strengths, nor does it know its own weaknesses, the combination of which can be physically and mentally deadly. We think we are so smart and know all that is right, and yet we don't understand the kind of destruction we could yield with the push of a button. For that kind of power to be in the hands of a generation like this is very dangerous. Europe has felt the effects of that kind of power at the time the last Greatest Generation lived. Could the GGR be more prophetic in name than we could possibly imagine?
All I know, of which I have a good idea, is that this coming generation and those that follow us will no doubt look back on this age and generation without much praise. They won't understand why we are disappointed and distraught with them, just like many of them don't know "why they hate us."
They won't like how we will probably treat them when it comes time for us to care for them - let's face it, it's difficult to care for those that wronged you years ago.
They won't understand you, because you think in ways and attitudes that are so foreign to them all they can do is say that your wrong, dumb, or "out of the mainstream."
They will scream at you, curse you, wonder why you aren't following in their footsteps, and, when they grow old, will probably become overly bitter about life in general, life and circumstances that their own arrogance and ignorance created.
Some may even hate you for what you become or what you do to right the wrongs that they so passively allowed to happen.
Whatever it is, it comes down to where people are very frightened of change. Today's religious right, corporate materialists, neocon fascists, they are nothing more than the same group of folks who felt very threatened by the change that was beckoned by some weird long-haired, sandal-wearing man that came from Bethlehem who only wanted to help those that were in need, sick, or cried out for real help, and who only wished for peace, real peace, in His time.
Whatever this current generation leaves behind for us to clean up, it will be up to us to make it right. Together, with more of a means of communicating beyond our small scope than ever before, we have the chance to really reverse what the GGR has been doing to, and is planning for, us and the rest of the world. To every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. If we stick to each other, our principles, and our sheer determination to make this place better than it is and could be, the future, should one exist, may very well be different than the one the Greatest Generation in Reverse would want it to be.