Listen to Your Children

Shut up. Turn off the TV. Put down the newspaper. Stop drinking your Scotch. Stop taking your Prozac. Put away your to-do list. Turn off your aromatherapy. Put away your cell phone. Turn off your pager, fax and computer. Stop your four-wheel-drive vehicle and refrain from looking in the rearview mirror at your graying, balding hair and crow’s-feet wrinkles.

Look at us instead, your children.

Look past our tattoos, our pierced body parts, naked abdomens and colored, spiked hair. Those are the more subtle attention-getters before guns and school massacres. After all, wasn’t that what you said to your parents, with your long hair, peace beads, Woodstock and “peace, love and happiness”? You are listening to us about as much as your parents listened to you and it feels to us the same as it did to you. Bad. It feels bad.

Remember how your parents blamed and pointed their fingers at everyone but themselves? They preached lack of morals, blamed drugs, the pill, the black movement, women’s lib. Deja vu? Well, you learned really well how to avoid doing the hardest work required of humans: listening to another perspective, understanding, looking for commonality and then taking the time to build the bridge of acceptance. When you don’t like the rules or the laws, you just change them to suit your needs of the day. Who cares about the consequences on the past or future generations? That’s the power of numbers--baby boomer numbers.

It seems implausible to you that any other generation could have another point of view. We are obliterated in the huge shadow of your presence. You twist and change meanings of words and ways of thinking, no matter how illogical, to suit your needs, blame others, manipulate for profit and shun responsibility.

But we see right through your hypocrisy. We know about your “recreational drugs” of the ‘60s, rationalized as mind-expanding and consciousness-raising. They later turned into your drug habit demons, along with group therapy, 12-step programs and detox centers. We scoff at your pathetic “Just say no” slogan, as if it worked for you. Get real.

Remember self-actualization and how it quickly turned into the “me generation” and instant gratification with junk bonds, savings and loan failures and credit card debt? Now you tell us to save while you spent all of your own resources and that of our grandparents. You tell us to care for the environment that you ransacked and obliterated by your quest for better and best. You preach simplicity after your burp, then pat your paunchy, satisfied belly. You tell us to abstain from sex for fear of HIV or other sexually transmitted diseases while you scan the Internet for private porn sites and sex chat rooms. You cheat on your marriage vows, have affairs, and don’t call sex sex. Do you think we don’t know that what you preach to us doesn’t match your actions? And we have to love and depend on you anyway.

You still want your cake and to eat it too, don’t you? You never want to ante up and pay for your choices or clean up your messes. You just move to a clean spot. Now you just want to change the rules. Well, lots of those rules are not man-made, so you can’t change them. So, eventually, you are going to die, and we inherit the mess, without a clue as to how to clean it up. Because you never taught us how.

Save your children. Build the bridges. Listen. Slow down. Take the time.

We, your kids, shouldn’t have to commit suicide or kill each other to get your attention.