The Cold War (certainty of yer ass becoming radioactive ash), recession after recession from late 50's into the 60's then a decade pf inflation. Pesticides (think Silent Spring), Cuban Missle Crisis, Civil Rights, the War (not War) in Vietnam and its subthreads: The Draft, My Lai, Agent Orange/operation Ranch Hand, The Summer of 68, JKK dead, Martin Luther King dead, RFK dead, The riots at the Democratic National Convention, The Population Bomb, the 1st Earth Day the 1967 Arab Israeli war etc. etc. etc.
Yes, these are troubling times. Really. Young folks really do face tough times. We all struggled. As students, we pushed for environmental protections... after years of effort we got the Clean Water and Clean Air Acts, The Endangered Species Act (God Bless the Sand Darter) under a Republican President! We set up the climate for the Equal RIghts Amendment. We helped set up the political climate in which Roe V Wade made it through SCOTUS.
Our outspokeness helped put America back on a path toward moral relationships within our nation and with countries that aren't capitalism deluded autocrat leaning democracies. We brought you: The Smothers Brothers, That Was the Week That Was, and when it wasn't anymore, we set the nation up to laugh at its own insanity via Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In. Strange that Lawerence Welk is still replayed in Milwaukee and most people don't remember TWTWTW (TW# as we called it). But that's reality.
I don't want to lecture young people. I don't want to brag about Boomers. I just want to point out that life in modern times is a huge challenge. The exploiters are out there intently exploiting. The rich are out there intently buying off governments. Fear of Nukes and Nuclear Winter won't end unless there are no nukes, and that really is quite unlikely to happen without young people's commitments to a shared future with the rest of the world.
My experience leaves me open seeing the anxiety and fear presented by rapidly changing unpredictable future by people who can't afford to live NOW.
But, I do believe in young people. They -WILL- find a way through this, because the alternative--not getting through this is absolutely unthinkable. Really, they will carry humanity through all this.
All I can really offer is an ask: for them to be careful not to kill themselves as they charge the guard-rails that they -must- crash. The future is REALLY going to NEED THEM alive and solving problems.
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