A while back, a lovely young lady (very young…college aged) wrote to our local newspaper begging for real leadership from the adults running her world.  Here is my response…

Dear Ms. Scofield:

Since it is we Boomers who are the leaders right now, it is us who owe you the kind of thoughtful, quality leadership you so dearly want, and who have so disappointed you.

And ironically, you have asked of us the kind of leadership we asked of our leaders in our day.   It is our generation that began the environmental movement – “sitting-in” and demonstrating our little hearts out against “the man” and the status quo he represented (corporate greed, pollution, segregation, few rights for women – sound familiar?) when we were your age!

Yea us!

Except that once we became  “the man” we happily backtracked on all that we believed as youth: we have been the main polluters with our gas guzzling cars and 3 homes; we are the CEO’s of the companies that ran the economy into the earth’s core and made decisions based on fattening our wallets vs. caring for our customers/planet; we abandoned the equal rights bill  so women still make significantly less than men for the same job; we are many of the legislators unproductively growling dogma along strict party lines or to ensure our re-election rather than doing what’s best for the state/country and our legacy.  We are doing exactly what our leaders were doing that we so abhorred.

I am so very proud of you.  And I am so very disappointed by the failings of my generation after such a slam-bang start.

So you and your peers keep up the pressure – and add to it that no one knows better than Boomers what is needed to take care of our state and the world.  Remind us of that for which we once fought.  And don’t stop until we blush and capitulate.

It’s the least we can do after all these decades of betrayal to our roots.