“Oh the times, they are a changing”

I’m from the protest generation.  The 60’s and 70’s, when I was growing up. were a time of huge cultural change regarding human rights and ideals.  The Vietnam War, POW and MIA movements, bra burning.  Working for or against the “MAN”.  Woman could finally get a loan and a credit card without a male co-signer.  We marched for peace, we smoked “funny stuff”, psychedelics   became a way to open the mind (trippy).  It was the “dawning of the age of Aquarians”.  All the cliches.  Some things were positive, some things were dangerous, some were wrong.  We lost friends to war, drugs, alcohol, crazy drug induced accidents, suicide.  We made less life choices based on gender, women entered cooperate America in greater numbers.

We were raised by parents and grandparents who believed that children should be sheltered, you weren’t allowed to enter into serious conversations with adults, you didn’t talk about “family business or finances”.  It wasn’t discussed in front of us.  Sex was a taboo topic.  Polite people never talked about politics or religion at social gatherings.  Neighborhoods were small and relatively safe.  You left home after breakfast in the summer. and often ate lunch at a friends house.  You came home by dinner time.  We walked or rode our bikes to school.  Highschool boys, especially in the country, went to school with shot guns in their car.  We had smoking areas at the High Schools.

Some of us grew up and realized that there was a balance between our world and their world.  We went to work for the “MAN”, we embraced some of their more traditional values and kept a lot of the social changes.  Others joined communes or entered into alternate live style choices.  We were more outspoken about social issues, continued to push for changes and at the same time entered into the previous “American Dream”.  We wanted our kids to have more opportunities than we had, pursue their dreams, work smarter, not harder.  We were part of the age of inventions, at no time in history has there been a time of such radical technological innovations.  We had record players and albums, then 8 tracks, cassette players, MP3 players, cd players, ipods and now we are streaming on our phones.  Phones?  Let’s talk telephones, wall phones, princess phones, cordless phones, bag phones, satellite phones, cell phones and now hand held mini computers.  We text not talk, text to talk… you get the general idea.

So where has that led us?  Perhaps it was too much too fast.  We now lead life at the speed of a sound wave.  Everything is instant, instant news, instant opinions, everyone is an expert about everything.  We discuss everything, we expose everything.  We are surrounded by constant chatter, constant debate and it seems instant hate and division.  We make our minds up about issues, people and ideas in a split second.  There is no opening of the mind, there is no contemplation about the deeper meaning of our lives and our purpose.  There is no “two sides to every story”, there is only our side and their side.  Maybe our parents and grandparents were onto something.  Maybe politics and religion should not be discussed in social settings.  Our former in person to person social setting has been replaced by social media.  We forget that there is another human on the other side of the discussion.  We see people not as people but as opinions. We don’t want to debate, we want to hate.  It seems people only respect themselves and those that agree with them.  Decorum and tact are a thing of the past.

Why is the current world full of the hatred and violence my generation fought so hard against?  Why have we left the age of Aquarius and entered the age of discontent?  Why isn’t anyone entitled to their opinion anymore?  It seems we have taught people to express themselves but we forgot to teach them how.  We have forgotten for every opinion, for every thought expressed, for every cause that is fought for and for every topic that is discussed, there is a human person involved.  A human person that is just as real, just as loved by someone, just as broken as you are, just as desperate to be heard.  They deserve respect, their life deserves respect, their opinion deserves respect, their heart deserves respect.  Agreement and respect are very different things.  You don’t need everyone to agree with you, no one is every completely right or wrong.  At the end of the day, if you can’t treat someone with respect and dignity as a human person, then your ideals, opinions and beliefs are just empty rhetoric.