The generation that built our super highways, university campuses, and hospital complexes also populated and built many church houses, large educational wings, church camps, private schools, and numerous global mission and relief agencies.
That generation added to the sparse social and civic capital as they began their
adult lives, often as folks returning as war veterans, having seen entire communities and nation-states laid waste. As their lives, reach, and power waned, they began spending that social capital, particularly with their Boomer children. How did they do this? By expecting those children to accept things as they were, removing the opportunity to create and work together to discern and overcome a variety of obstacles. They built and ran things but could have been better at allowing their children to develop, build, or run things.
Now the colleges they built are consolidating or closing. The denominations, camps, and churches they gave so much to are shrinking rapidly, further accelerated by COVID. The bridges they built are in an almost insurmountable state of disrepair.
The Boomer generation did make headway with some societal ills once their elders could no longer hold control and got out of the way. They continued advances in civil rights, for example, but the overall Boomer (and Buster/GenXers who appear here and there) record is one of deconstruction and reorganization. They mostly shifted, consumed, and technologized the resources they inherited rather than emphasized the creation or expansion of the common good. Concern shifted to the exercise of individual freedom and fulfillment over coming together to build. The priority of the individual exceeded the stewardship of hard-to-build civic equity that includes self-sacrifice and service.
And now it seems that this already lessened equity is falling more rapidly—especially with our youngest adults who enjoy associating with one another, but often in virtual ways rather than in real life, constructing ones.
In our current moment, regardless of what generation we refer to, relational connections are forming out of common outrage but not to keep bridges safe. We protest and send flaming social media messages but do not attend to long-term, multi-generational family, culture, civic behaviors, and enterprise. We hook up but are not signing up to be counted.
It is time to look in our neighbor's eyes again, to join with them to build something, to make with others rather than take from them, especially on behalf of the generations who will come after us.
The sum of social equity needs to be larger and more prominent in our wake, not just from our woke. Greater environmental sustainability; the possibility of an estate to care for family members that survive us; the courage to address the downstream effects of the business we build and the products/services we offer; this is the balance sheet I want to track.
Who will benefit from our lives and that of the leading generation? For how long?
-mark l vincent
Comments