Defiant Imagination

The generation gap

I don’t think that we have ever experienced, at least in American history, a transformation of political opinion like the one we’ve seen in the past several years on the environment and climate. Young people understand that the world we’re talking about is the world they’re going to raise their kids in, that this isn’t a distant reality, that the ice caps are melting now. While that gives me hope, the gap of understanding between those people and the 70-year-olds who are in the U.S. Senate is staggering. It’s a generation gap that makes everything the boomers talked about in the 1960s look like a disagreement at a tea party.

This is an excerpt from an essay written by Alex Steffen, executive editor of Worldchanging.com and editor of the book Worldchanging: A User’s Guide for the 21st Century, that was published in the January/February edition of Good magazine.

As a twentysomething student, I’ve often felt frustrated by some of my teachers’ inability to use new technology, by my parents’ lack of optimism, by the fact that politicians take decisions in matters in which they have no experience. The world is moving and changing really fast, and instead of taking decisions based on what happened in the past decades, maybe we should start thinking about what will happen tomorrow. I was amazed to learn that the White House restrict the number of emails sent by the President for security reasons. Many judges, who sometimes have to rule on matters that will set a precedence, have never used the Internet. How does this reflect our society? What does it say about the generation gap? Politicians and decisionmakers have to remember to listen to citizens and we have the responsibility to remind them to do so.

Read the whole article here.