Of late there are a lot of people on social media who profess to be out to save the world. It's certainly a noble cause and often I'm drawn to read what they're saying in the hope that they have some solutions to how we can accomplish this. Unfortunately, I'm usually disappointed.
You see, most of the time when they post something it's usually to point fingers at who or what is to blame. If you want to interact, then there seem to be three, main potential responses you can make. You can agree with them and have a little conversation about how terrible it is, maybe complain about it a bit more and commiserate on how all the people who allow this to happen should be locked up or wiped from existence. You can ask them what they think can be done by us personally to correct the issue, which usually ends any opportunity of further conversation due to their lack of response. Or thirdly, you can disagree and enjoy the insults and general backlash coming your way. I do believe some people genuinely enjoy this third approach, purely for the drama.
We have a generation of young people reaching maturity at a period in time where we're hitting a lot of crisis points caused by a multitude of previous mistakes. As we look back at the mistakes made we can start to see which generations they occurred in and what brought them about. Unfortunately, this has led to a lot of finger pointing at certain generations who, while their era may have been at a turning point to the path we're on, had no awareness of where that pathway would lead. Have you heard that everything is hard now because the “baby boomers” spent their children's futures? Seriously? Even if this were entirely accurate, do you think they would have done this had the been aware of it?
With the accessibility of the internet and the biggest players on it being the US, we also seem to have this belief that whatever is happening or has happened in America automatically applies to the rest of the world. However, there were huge differences between the situation in American post war history and the rest of the western world. Many countries post war were in rationing. So many baby boomers were born into that. America, on the other hand, was going into an economic boom. Lots of new gadgets were being made to make life in the home easier. So if you were born in the UK or Australia, the chances are the baby boomers weren't spending your future, they were working their butts off to try and keep their heads above water and save for retirement. And no, I'm not a baby boomer, I'm the child of baby boomers and I learnt from them how to be frugal and how not to waste.
As generation X we were born into better economic times, but also into the start of an awareness of the damage people are causing to the environment. As a parent of millennials I can see the education we can give them has the potential to help them to be the inventors, problem solvers and educators that our lack of preparedness didn't a allow for. However, if they continue this pattern of just pointing the finger of blame instead of finding solutions, then how can we make any changes?
While it is certainly useful to know what is causing a problem, continuing merely discuss that problem in order to blame various things for it gets us no closer to formulating a solution. It's certainly easy to fall into the trap of feeling like you have no control over things because of the overwhelming implications of the actions of others, but it's a waste of energy.
I learnt as a child that if you want something done you can't necessarily rely on those in a position of authority to do it for you. There are no superheroes ready to swoop in and save us from evil and destruction. More often than not we have to pull ourselves out of dangerous situations and it's not easy. When you realise how hard it is, you realise why others aren't going to be inclined to do it for you. This is why it's entirely pointless to blame others for a bad situation. Maybe if they stop blaming others for problems, people will actually start finding ways to solve them. After all, by just blaming and doing nothing, aren't we essentially allowing these things to happen? In which case, maybe we should all be locked up or wiped out, if that's to be the solution to things we don't like.