Fr. Bob recently posted a brief quote about the Millennials (Generation Y) on his blog recently. My visceral response to it captured for me how I feel about the kinds of generational generalizations that have become fashionable in the last few years. I think this kind of demographic thinking can come to represent the worst kind of discourse of humans about power. It is the step between, "We will win because of the power of our ideas" and "We will win through overwhelming force." Instead, demographic analysis becomes a way for older generations to project their discontents on the rising generation and say to the theses of their age, "We will win by the power of our ideas seeded in the minds of a new generation." Or as the Salty Vicar once put it, "We will eat your children."
As a Millennial, I, of course, would like to blame my parents' generation as a whole for all manner of evils: the rape of the environment, the destruction of traditional institutions of American civic life, the corruption of the traditional institutions that survived, the loss of idealism, and the obsession with theological uncertainty and transgressive theories. But there is nothing historically inevitable about my generation doing the opposite or reforming the Boomers' mistakes. You can't put vices back in the box. You can't go back to the forest. Social change is inherently hysteretical. The very process of change prevents the system from being anywhere as reversible as it was versible.
I would prefer that if older generations have programs of innovation or reform, they realize that some Millennials may accommodate them. But they do not allow those Millennials to participate in these programs of innovation or reform independently, creatively, and moderately, so that they do not allow those programs to be instructed and corrected, they diminish those Millennials as human beings and impoverish themselves.
I'm pretty sure Fr. Bob knows these things. He, after all, is operating at the grassroots. But let him and others like him be reminded of them anyway.
3 comments:
I have to admit I've grown weary of Fr. Bob's focus on "blaming the Boomers" for everything that's wrong in the world.
Yes, the Boomers made mistakes - but to imagine that these mistakes account for all the church's current problems is naive and simplistic.
I guess I've just gotten tired of the whole "you suck but we're the real deal" approach. It's actually the same old story, a generation later....
As a later Gen X'er I too weary of this sort of analysis simply because I do not fit the mould on every count. And because we were dismissed as of no importance, a generation sandwiched between the Boomers and Gen Y. God does not dismiss persons and each generation has something to contribute. I have friends in every generation alive and I treasure this. We each have our problems, but we also bring gifts and perspectives that are mutually enriching.
Boomers are not the cause of all the problems we now face in church and society today. I would remind those who have nothing but bile for the Boomers that the 1950s America in which they grew up was not an utopia. Some really ugly realities existed at that time and our civic and economic institutions often propped these up. They already had seeds of corruption, and WWII did not help this as William Stringfellow was long to remind us. That the pendulum swung against it isn't a surprise. But mind you, not all Boomers were involved in the same ways in making changes. Environmental degradation has been a reality for over a century. Some of the worst mine outcomes (like the one near Redding or the one near Holden Village) are the result of mining before Boomers were born. And at heart Orthodoxy in its praised reality is the most transgressive of all, but then, sometimes it takes coloring outside the lines for us to see again the radicality of the Incarnation and Trinity and no more so than in relation to ecological devastation and poverty. The economy of God stands in Othercultural contrast. The corporate presence of Christ questions corporate greed at the expense of all living beings.
Thank you for your post.
i am not quite sure to what generation I belong. I think I am on the cusp between Y and X...
I agree with what you say quoting the Salty Vicar.
Have you seen the latest bit of publishing about Gen Y from the Church of England?? Interesting to say the least...
http://www.chpublishing.co.uk/product.asp?id=2395594
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