A lot of my life long friends appear to have become comfortably numb. We are the baby boomers, probably have lived inside a nation state, and realm, that has been more coddled and brainwashed into believing in an American Dream than any ever before it. We lived the best of times. A time when if one worked hard, they could make more money and live a more comfortable and stress-free life than their depression era parents before them. Yup, we lived the dream.
And, yes, we had freedoms, never dreamed of these days. We were free range kids. A lot of us had a parent, usually a Mom, who stayed home, cooked our meals, and prepared our school lunches.
In my personal experience, a lot of it was hard work, strict schedules, and harsh rules (and a distinct existence of familial dysfunctionality). But, in my free time, as a child, I experienced a freedom to explore, make up games, climb trees, ride my horse, wade through creeks and climb really, really tall trees.
Most of us survived all of these "dangerous" undertakings as children, without seat belts or helmets or even multiple vaccines. Most of us experienced measles and chicken pox and whooping cough and any other colds and flues that were prominent in the day. We ate healthy home grown foods, ate organic eggs, drank whole milk, and there was no such thing as pesticides and GMO grown foods.
What astounds me more than anything, well at least as much, is that so many of my own generation, who have watched our warmongering nation exploit, plunder and murder in foreign nations for all our lives, have mostly just looked the other way. My parents experienced WWII, the "good" war. They didn't want to think about war. In fact, it was never talked about during my childhood. It was mostly about, who is going to shut up the hen house tonight, or, time to shut your horse and the milk cow up in the barn for the night.
I came of age during the Vietnam war, a few of my high school classmates perished in that useless and rich mans war. Many in my generation spit on the men and women who returned home. No matter my opposition to the war, I could never condone that kind of behavior. We each make personal decisions on the information we are fed, what we believe to be real and true. We often make bad decisions, like going to war to kill and be killed to make others richer than they already are. But how many young men and women understand or know anything about that? If they did, they would not go to war. Their suffering they carry for the rest of their lives. War is a beast for profit, but I could never, ever hate those that did what they thought was right at the time.
We have been in wars for my entire life. I've marched against a few of them. I've written letters. I've signed petitions. I also tried to live my life, take care of myself, and create a life of financial independence. That's all I ever strove for, just independence. So, now I am here, gratefully, compared to so many billions of others on this planet.
But I also know that the ground I stand on in my independence is as precarious and tenuous as the refugee fleeing a bombed out village because in any moment, just as that refugee experienced, it could all come to an end just like that.
My generation should know better. We are now in the greatest fight for our lives, but too many of us remain coddled and still brainwashed to somehow think that out of billions of humans, we are somehow the lucky ones, the chosen ones? After all, many of us own homes, have pensions, the SS checks are still coming in, we have health insurance, our property values are going up, and our golf scores are still good, even with our arthritic knees.
I have tried never to take my generations offerings of opportunities to better myself for granted. I've tried and lost and tried again many times. I learned pretty much by doing and the hard way, and by accepting personal responsibility for my many mistakes.
And, my generation are not a bunch of weaklings. I knew a lot of them coming up over all the years.
However, we are now facing the biggest battle for the future of the next generations that we have ever faced. And if we don't get out of our comfort zones, everything we ever worked for is going, going and gone. And most of you have children and grandchildren and even great grandchildren. I have none of those, so why do I care more about their futures than you do?
Now is NOT the time to be comfortably numb. Time to wake up, look around, observe, and become aware again of that survival instinct we all had when we were young -- when we were fearless, when we were invincible.