By Dan Hazen / Herald Forum
We were all up in arms about the “Big Storm.”
It was supposed to drop huge hail stones, deliver copious lightning, thunder and maybe even a tornado. Turns out there was some rain, a little wind, and apart from a couple of lightning strikes, nothing unusual for a March storm around here.
Increasingly, we get frothy and worked up over all sorts of things that, in the end, amount to very little. A celebrity says something rude, so they’re boycotted. A person stubs their toe on a brick and a movement to ban bricks is launched. A kid decides they want to change genders, and everyone loses their minds (“Drag queens should lead story time!” or “No one speaks to my child without written authorization and a lawyer!”)
We occupy a point in history when society is uptight, anxious, angry, afraid and paranoid. Some of the blame lies with technology: Our outrage circles the globe instantly, infecting millions at a time. But some of the blame lies with the absence of “elders.” people with wisdom, experience and a sense of calm in a crisis (or more valuable, knowing what constitutes a crisis in the first place).
On the day of the storm, as I watched local meteorologists on TV inventing new ways to sow panic in their viewers, I found myself looking for the old-timey weather man. Someone with gray hair and an off-the-rack suit who steps in front of the camera and does what elders do: put things into perspective. “It’s March. We usually see a storm or two in March. March is windy. Sometimes there’s lightning and even hail in March. It’s probably going to happen tonight. Be careful out there. Now, back to you, Biff… .”
Elders are out there. They’re alive. They have opinions (Boy! do they have opinions!). They possess knowledge and experience, but as a generation they lack wisdom. They whip-sawed from Woodstock to Wall Street without slowing down to consider what they learned (or didn’t learn). They moved from one expression of self-involvement to the next.
Today their statuses range from sociopathic occupant of the White House to impoverished drug addict, from cashing dividend checks in an Arizona walled community, to languishing alone in an adult family home, grieving the loss of an actual family they never bothered to nurture. Despite these differences in status, it’s one large, monolithic block focused on itself.
Of course there are exceptions, but that’s my point: The exception is the servant-minded elder who remains engaged for the sake of the next generation. The rule is the senior citizen who never progressed beyond the vain complacency of their 20s. The rule is a generation who produced the “latch key kid,” who then grew up to produce the “spoiled millennial,” who in turn produced pessimistic and isolated “zoomers” and “Gen alphas” who were never taught by an elder the difference between what matters and what doesn’t; who have never seen a grown-up model perseverance, display gratitude in the face of hardship, exercise delayed gratification, or real sacrifice. They’ve never watched an older person successfully grapple with the question, “Could I? But should I?”
This is not about the individual grandparent doing their best to raise their own grandkids (calm down, boomer). It’s about a collective reality that those of us of a certain age must admit we are not just responsible for, but that we, sucking up Social Security dollars faster than the millennials can produce them, are uniquely positioned to correct.
Hey, boomer. Do something radical one more time before you punch the clock: Slow down. Scale back. Simplify. Divest. Repent. A real storm is brewing and this time, it’s coming for your grandkids.
Dan Hazen lives in Marysville and works in Everett.
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