Generations of Improvement

Judging past generations by today's standards is like critiquing the first wheel for not being a sports car.

Generations of Improvement

Each generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it.

George Orwell

Gosh, weren't those previous generations so uninformed? I can't believe they didn't have the values and the knowledge we hold nowadays. So uncivilized. How did they even get through the day? Let alone build everything we hold dear and every civilization currently on earth?

Every generation laughs at the old fashions, but follows religiously the new.

Henry David Thoreau

One thing that's difficult for me to understand is how we can judge previous generations on their mistakes. There are some mistakes that are worthy of judgement. Persecutions they knew were morally deplorable. The Nazis. Stuff like that.

But what about certain things like how they raised their kids? The Boomers raised their kids how they knew best. They were trying to correct the mistakes they saw from The Greatest Generation.

The greatest generation was formed first by the Great Depression. They shared everything - meals, jobs, clothing.

Tom Brokaw

Then Gen X raised Millennials trying to correct for the mistakes of the Boomers. And the Millennials tried to raise Gen Z fixing the mistakes of Gen X.

Every one of those generations were also dealing with a completely different world and society than the generation before. Boomers and Gen X weren't in their formative years during the digital age. Boomers weren't during the world wars.

Millennials were the last generation to not be fully engrossed by a ubiquitous internet. And Gen Z's kids will be raised during some other massive shift in the world and culture.

Struggle is a never ending process. Freedom is never really won, you earn it and win it in every generation.

Coretta Scott King

This is the growth of humanity. Slowly and by generation. Standard of living improves with each successive generation and we have to figure out how to continue living properly with all those changes. We also have to cope with attending to the mistakes we saw from the generation immediately preceding our own. That's all we can do.

None of those generations will be perfect. We cannot be perfect, that's not who we are. Life is complicated and it has always been complicated. So why demonize entire groups of people that came before? Demonize one or two, sure. That makes sense. Nobody wants to take the side of Hitler except those ostracized by society and starving for attention.

They will always exist, unfortunately. But nobody properly socialized and integrated into a society would do that. But it is common to find people from one generation blaming all of societies problems on a previous generation.

Posterity! You will never know how much it cost the present generation to preserve your freedom! I hope you will make a good use of it.

John Adams

That's an awful lot of people to lump together. That's literally everyone that came before you. Of course they're to blame, of course that's the case.

But we cannot forget that the next generations will also be pointing their finger at us as the cause of society's decline and problems. And they will be right to do so. But what does that accomplish?

It accomplishes one thing. Excuse making. That's it. What we can do instead is recognize mistakes and recognize triumphs. We can recognize both without reducing either.

Few will have the greatness to bend history itself; but each of us can work to change a small portion of events, and in the total; of all those acts will be written the history of this generation.

Robert Kennedy

And when we can do that, we can work to correct the mistakes made while preserving the progress gained. When we only look at the problems of the past and ignore the progress made, we risk making changes that negate that progress.

Let's be careful. Let's be grateful. Those generations that came before were necessary for us to be where we are now. They should be celebrated. All of them.

Love,

Dad

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