8.2 Boomers, let's not lie to young people
This morning I woke up into a memory of young people marching down Market Street in San Francisco, hundreds of them, high schoolers and middle schoolers, climate srikers in full voice, protesting with all their might.
Now, a couple years later, there are even more young people…
Declaring a state of emergency.
And telling us…
How scared they are.
And how bitter they are, like when they say…
“We don’t get to have a future.”
What are they asking for?
Action.
Radical action. On a scale unlike anything our species has ever carried out before.
But when they look at the world, what do they see?
Politics gone crazy.
Tens of millions of people losing their minds.
Powerful corporate forces defending the status quo.
Major countries making a hard right turn into authoritarianism.
Hateful buffoons and sociopathic grifters taking charge of those nations.
Young people find themselves up against political and economic elites who are doing exactly the wrong things, and who, as Chris Hedges says, are…
Acting as if they hated humankind and wanted it dead.
In my country, the United States, young people are looking to our country to step up and do the right thing and provide leadership. But if we Americans can’t even manage to put an end to poverty, racism, and sexism here at home, we’re definitely not up to the challenge of leading the world through the transformation it would take to save our species.
Meanwhile, there are Boomers, members of my generation, who tell young people…
You’re the ones who will save humankind.
Then quietly they add this caveat…
By the way, you have twelve years to pull this off.
And finish with a cheery vote of confidence…
We believe in you!
On the surface, this sounds like the simple passing of the baton, but it’s not…
It’s a dump job.
I’m an old guy now. My life will be coming to a close sooner rather than later. By the time the worst of the environmental crisis hits, I’ll be gone…
But these young people will be here for it.
They’ll be assaulted by climate disasters and dangerous political shifts that will likely turn brutal.
Things are so much darker for them than they were for my generation when we were starting out.
I remember back in the sixties, how optimistic we were…
We thought we were saving the world.
We really thought that.
We did some good things and had some victories along the way, but truth be told, we’ve now had fifty years of earnest activism by Boomers, and…
The prognosis is worse than ever.
It’s just plain wrong to lay the burden of salvation on young people because…
They’re up against much greater odds than we Boomers ever were and we failed.
Scary books are being published which drive home the argument that we’re in terrible trouble. They’re big books, three hundred pages of alarming facts jammed in there with no filler…
Just punch, punch, punch.
Then in the closing chapter, there’s a quick upbeat flourish as if the book were…
A long train of horrors with a little red caboose of hope.
I wonder if the publishers tell the authors they’d better end on a positive note or else their books won’t sell. In any event, the final rah–rah chapter never seems to hold nearly the conviction the damning chapters do.
Over the coming years, as the crises we’re facing continue to multiply and deepen, hope will become harder to hold onto. As young people see their call to action ignored, or answered with the tap dance of excuses and the razzle–dazzle of counterfeit solutions…
More and more of them will give up on hope.
Millions of them.
It’s unfair for those so young to have to face something as monstrous as the very real possibility of human extinction even before they’ve figured out who they are or what they want to do with their lives.
And what will we Boomers choose to do in response? Will we give them pep talks? Will we preach platitudes? Will we promise easy steps for salvation? Will we turn our backs and walk away because…
We really have nothing for them and don’t want to face our helplessness?
The choice is clear…
Abandon young people.
Or…
Be there for them.
It’s such an easy thing to say—being there—but such a profound thing to actually do.
Of course, young people get to choose to hold onto hope if they want. We don’t get to decide that for them. They get to make their own path. And there are thousands of books and videos they can turn to which are filled with inspirational messages to boost their optimism.
But here, I’m focusing on young people who have already lost hope. And for them, there’s next to nothing. Our society has left them on their own.
We’re a species that depends on hope. It’s kept us going in tough times. So to lose it is a terrible thing. Painful and scary. And…
Young people are not prepared for this loss.
So of course it hits them hard.
But if we want to take a stand with young people, there are two things we can do that matter most.
1. First we help them feel for themselves.
Say there’s a young person in your family who you love with all your heart and she’s lost hope and lost it so completely she can’t imagine it ever coming back.
And you listen to her down into the very depths of her distress. You listen to her until she’s talked out. You listen so well that she reveals her secret fears. Some of which she might have been keeping secret from herself.
In your presence, in conversation with you, she gets to know herself in a new way. She makes discoveries she might not have gotten to on her own.
She gets to see that when she gives you the worst of her distress, you continue to stand by her. You continue to be her steadfast advocate. You don’t pep talk her. You don’t turn and run. So now she knows…
She can trust you.
And it’s such a relief for her to have someone she can count on, especially on her darkest days…
Especially when her own feelings scare her and she doesn’t want to be alone with them.
And so she decides to keep talking with you whenever she needs to.
And she decides to…
Take herself to heart like never before.
2. Then we help them fight for themselves.
So you start by providing comforting and company. But then you add in challenge. The challenge fighting for herself. And for the people she cares about. And for her community. And for what she believes in.
When hope disappears on you, despair is waiting right there to take you down. It’s a terrible enemy. It will kill your spirit. It will take from you everything that makes you a blessing to the people in your life.
So it matters that as soon as possible after a young person loses hope that she gets immediate help in fighting for herself.
It matters that…
She puts her whole heart into this fight.
And what will help her do this?
It helps if she understands that despair is not the only option after the death of hope, that in fact…
You can replace hope with fight.
It helps if she understands that…
There is life after the death of hope and it can be good.
Not easy, but good.
It’s important for her to know that…
Love does not depend on hope.
And…
Activism does not depend on hope.
It matters that she gets to see that there is such a thing as…
Post-hope activism.
Which she can take up if she wants to. And it’s more rewarding than traditional salvation activism. And it comes with a new mission she can adopt if she chooses, and that is…
To take the best possible care of ourselves and each other on our way out.
What role can we Boomers play in this? If we understand about fight, the value of it and how it works, we can help young people find their own personal sense of fight and develop it and deepen it, and then go beyond where we’ve gotten to.
But if you’re a hope person, if you depend on hope to keep you going, a deep conversation about the death of hope could be really difficult for you.
Of course, if your hope is deeply rooted, there will be no problem. You won’t be thrown off balance.
An awful lot of people, though, are getting by on hope that’s too shallow. It defends them against despair in the routine of their everyday lives pretty well, but it’s not strong enough to handle a serious challenge.
I was like that in my early activist days when I was preaching the gospel of hope. Back then, if you didn’t believe in hope, I didn’t want to be around you. You were a threat to my precarious sense of hope.
In fact…
In those days I would not have wanted to know the person I am now. I would have been scared of my unbelief.
So if you’re trying to hang onto to a minimal version of hope but then a young person you love loses hope, you’re suddenly up against a tough dilemma…
Do you be with this young person in her distress but at the risk of losing the hope which you so depend on?
Going through the motions will not work. Pretending to be with her when you’re not really will not work. She’ll smell your resistance and then won’t trust you enough to tell you her whole truth.
And so…
She might end up taking care of you by holding herself in check.
Which would be all backwards.
So maybe instead you’ll say to her…
I can’t be with you on this part of your life journey. I’m too scared. But I will help you find someone who can stand by you.
A very thoughtful thing to do. But then you’re stuck carrying the sadness of not being there personally for this young person you love.
I’ve lived without hope for decades now. I’m very much settled into my post–hope life. So you might think it would be easy for me to be there for a young person who has just lost hope.
And it is easier for me than it is for a believer in hope, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy.
The loss of hope is so very painful it can feel unbearable.
If you accompany a young person into their post–hope life…
You’re going to hurt right along with them.
I say this because I’m not talking about just being there for them as a witness. I’m talking about being there with them in deep companionship…
Even while your heart is breaking for them.
