“The boys look like girls, the girls look like boys, their poetry is gibberish, their music is trash …”
And no one respects their elders. Does this sound familiar? It was written on a shred of pottery, in the days of Sumer some 4,000 years ago. It may have been the cradle of civilisation but it represents part of our society’s ‘survivor baggage’, complaining about the future generations.
What can we tell the young ones in the digital world today about our survivor baggage? Well, we were young too long ago, believe it or not. We had our own dreams of creating a different future, of shaping the world that surrounded us. What did we do?
Part of the survivor baggage of our over-60 generation is that we may have wrecked the world’s environment on our path to our golden years. Young ones, we made lots of mistakes. We worsened climate change by chopping down forests and by pumping loads of chemicals into the atmosphere.
How reversible is this climate change? This is now your problem, future generations. Our survivor baggage is leaving you a giant task. Yes, we made mistakes. Didn’t mean to. Over to you, best have a Millennial think tank to seek ways and means to produce more oxygen for you and your children to breathe.
More of our survivor baggage for future generations is over-population. At least 400,000 babies are born each day on Planet Earth. We keep on breeding little humans, with an insatiable demand for food, housing and employment. The teeming billions are now inhabiting our world. Did we fail at controlling fertility, part of our survivor baggage?
But wait, there’s more! We have also created an oversupply of plastics in the world of today. We have made most of our stuff from plastic, wrapped it in plastic and used plastics to make more plastics.
I am talking about our computers, our phones, our plastic wrap, our plastic food containers, even in cars, radios and televisions. All of this had enlarged the supply of fluorohydrocarbons in the world. What can the young ones do about plastic? Any small step would build a bridge to overcome a globe of plastic, ending up as garbage that lasts at least 1,000 years.
Survivor baggage, survivor baggage. We survived the sexual revolution of the swinging ’60s, and the ‘sex, drugs, and rock’n’roll’ of the ’70s, but now there is an abundance of sexually transmitted diseases in our world, our baggage for the future generations. Of course, that may have been allied with dabbling in drugs, which some of the Baby Boomers practised.
These days, drugs are the scourge of the devil. We all wait for the ‘authorities’ to do something about illicit drug usage. We survived, but shall the young ones?
As current senior citizens, our survivor baggage included no-fault divorces, with attendant effects on the children of each divorce. This has led to part of the marginalisation of income levels in society. The survivor baggage of a person who is a ‘have’ in our land of Oz is different to someone who is a ‘have-not’.
Then along the way to our new old age, some of us decided we were growing fat, so we invented a weight loss industry, to tell us which foods to eat. Our consultants advised us to exercise more, so there is now a gym industry, with fitness trainers.
This is our survivor baggage for the future of society, we drive in air-conditioned cars to exercise in a gym, because we are fat. But not one of us is game to tell anyone in Somalia that! That’s our survivor baggage.
Most of us have survived this far on our path. We lost a few along the way, but the survivors are navigating ageing our own way. We are all living longer, thanks to modern medical interventions.
We’ll all purchase our plastic glasses, plastic hearing aids, have our cataracts treated with plastic corneas, our plastic hip replacements, our plastic knee reconstructions, maybe plastic pacemakers, or plastic stents. We didn’t mean to grow old, we just did, in a natural kind of plastic way.
That is some of our Baby Boomer survivor baggage. Why whinge about the Millennial younger generation? They best start planning how they can mend the survivor baggage we are leaving the future generations of Planet Earth. When we graduate to our nursing homes, the young ones shall have to care for us. Still, we ‘don’t need no rocking chair!’ and when we do, that will be plastic too! All part of survivor baggage!