By Victoria Koch
It’s been a difficult time lately for many families all over the world. As a retired teacher and simply an older human being, I love talking with young people. And believe me, they are talking!
My current anxiety increases as I listen to them. Their talk can be deeply dark and hopeless. They think the Baby Boom generation, of which I am one, had life easier with housing, necessities and college tuition. Everything was affordable and job opportunities were abundant.
I am a person who has to have at least some hope during troubled times. I can’t disagree with what our youth are going through and I often want to apologize to them for how our world has become. But I also believe our history has always been filled with what I want to call “existential angst.”
We have come through dark periods before and we will come through them again. This will only happen when the older and younger generations learn to listen to each other and work together. We both have to make our voices heard.
Many Baby Boomers are children of World War II parents who, like my Dad, fought against the Nazis and Fascists in Europe. It didn’t serve my German heritage Dad to soldier on the European and African front battle lines. My childhood was not easy. We were poor and my at-home mother also had to find work. I was the first to go to college, but I worked my way through, even with cheaper tuition. I lived abroad when there was East and West Germany and I experienced the results of World War II firsthand.
It wasn’t a piece of cake for us Boomers. The Vietnam War took its toll. I lost a high school friend to this war. Protests similar to today were ongoing. We lived through quite a few terrible presidents, Richard Nixon, George Bush and Ronald Reagan. We lived through the assassinations of Medgar Evers, President John Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr. and the beloved Beatle John Lennon. Then there was the 9/11 New York World Trade Center catastrophe and the Iraq War, etc. It is hard enough just being human without all our self-caused disasters!
As I have grown up, I have naively believed we might not have wars by now.
“Imagine all the people Livin’ life in peace.”
But I am seeing that we human beings are pretty stupid. We are destroying ourselves, and we are destroying Mother Earth. Yes, why do we continue to create the anxiety we are living through and when will we ever learn? Boomers, Millennials, Gen Z, Gen Alpha.
Let’s come together! “Imagine all the people/ Sharing all the world.”
Victoria Koch is a mother, a retired teacher, a writer, a gardener and a lover of the positive human spirit.