If you’ll pardon the rather Americanized cultural overwash coming from a Canadian… and the likely typos and small errors…
Let me know what you think.
**************************************************October 4th, 1957: The race was on – the race of a lifetime, perhaps the race of the human race's lifetime. When Sputnik was launched into space, the urgency of the pace for Boomers stepped up and never looked back. A generation that itself began on a surge of post-war optimism gained a harder edge and an ominous subtext. The 1960 Broadway hit musical, Bye Bye Birdie, included a song "Got a Lot of Livin' to Do" whose lyrics – "music to play, places to go, people to see...everything for you and me..." – suggest a frenzy even in recreation.
When I look back on my high-school performance of that play, during North America's fifties' revival craze in the late 1970's, I recall the natural exuberance of a high-school hormones...but I now wonder about whether that age, in both its initial and revival stages, was also souped up on an even more powerful jolt: Better hurry up and get in the livin', kids, because who knows what kind of world we're in now?
If you were born after the Sputnik launch, that officially makes you a child of the space age. Science fiction is far older than that, but space travel crossed into the realm of science fact, or at least viable possiblity, at that point. So, unfortunately, did its close cousin from the recently-advented Atomic Age: the possibility of mutually-assured destruction.
Watching footage of President Kennedy propose an American national goal "...before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the Earth," it's easy to see a grand romantic moment. I visited the
Then, at the age of 35, I looked at the mass and the size and the bulk and the heft and the implied power of that rocket, and for the first time understood the grim force that had propelled us as a species into space: fear of annihilation. The Saturn V-B was the heritage of not just the space race but the arms race. While this rocket itself was not built to deliver the payload of death and destruction to fellow humans on the other side of the globe, it was meant to be a perpetual reminder to the world, especially contrary-minded communists presumed to be equally bent on world domination, that America was capable of doing that, and could do so any time it pleased.
A rather expensive message-delivery system. Thank goodness we finally got email and CNN.
But my point is this: Boomers have been in high-propellant mode, surrounded by cues our whole lives, to achieve. All our lives, we have gotten the message that indolence would surely mean immolation; industry meant survival. Got to push, got to get a move on. It wasn't just a nice idea to ask what we could do for our country: our country needed us, and everything we could give, brain and brawn, if we were to hope to live in an age with a motto other than "Duck-and-Cover."
The Bye Bye Birdie gang had a lot of living to do because they were about to be drafted into
As if the global geopolitical merry-go-round weren't dizzying enough, Tom Friedman has been writing about the flattening of the world for coming up on a decade. In the introduction to "The Lexus and the Olive Tree", he says it better than I could hope to:
If the defining anxiety of the Cold War was fear of annihilation from an enemy you knew all too well in a world struggle that was fixed and stable, the defining anxiety in globalization is fear of rapid change from an enemy you can't see, touch or feel—a sense that your job, community or workplace can be changed at any moment by anonymous economic and technological forces that are anything but stable.
In the Cold War we reached for the hot line between the White House and the Kremlin—a symbol that we were all divided but at least someone, the two superpowers, was in charge. In the era of globalization we reach for the Internet—a symbol that we are all connected but nobody is in charge. The defining defense system of the Cold War was radar—to expose the threats coming from the other side of the wall. The defining defense system of the globalization era is the X-ray machine—to expose the threats coming from within.
Take one globe, already shaken, stir in AIDS and an injection of avian flu, and then wrap in a blanket of global warming. Friday's paper reported that 29 percent of marine species are in decline and, declared the researcher from Dalhousie, "...our children will see a world without seafood if we don't change things." How have we managed to screw up a world that is 75% covered by water? How in hell do we even get up in the morning?
In one way or another, Boomers have been fuelled by fear for a half century. We responded so well to it that fear has become a staple of everything from politics and entertainment to consumer marketing (insofar as one can tell them apart – remember the first time you got taken in by a parody ad on Saturday Night Live?). In 1989, the official icon of the Cold War was sledgehammered into dust, and an entire genre of fiction became passe as we wondered who the next big enemy would be. Who knew that we were heading into an era when we would long for the fundamental black-and-white simplicity of MAD Magazine's Spy-versus-Spy cartoons, Boris and Natasha, and Agents 86, 99, and 007?
In 1992 we found out, up close and personal, courtesy of CNN's gift of real-time televised war in the Gulf. A sub-cult of addicts went into withdrawal when their nightly fix of fear was no longer available. Remember in 2001 how long we stayed glued to our sets in the days and weeks following 9/11, as if watching that second plane hit for the 37th time would somehow accomplish anything, would somehow reveal truth or meaning or solace, or maybe give us, the brightest, smartest generation anyone had ever seen, The Answer to all this?
While we're at it, let's hear it for multi-tasking. I am slowly coming to the conclusion that my multi-tasking ability is not only nothing to be proud of, it's a sign that I'm slipping backwards into the attention span of a two-year-old. I have to make a conscious decision to leave home without my Blackberry, which is also my cell phone, and am sad to report that it feels disorienting to not be checking my email every few minutes. Why do I do it? ("Can you hear me now?" asks the man in the cell phone commercial, checking reception. "Do you want me now?" I think.) One of the glorious luxuries I found when I started my own business was that I would occasionally work on just one single solitary project for perhaps six hours straight. (The joy! The richness! The focus!)
Look at the rising ubiquity and seemingly endless variants of episodic shows like CSI and Law And Order: short kid-sized snippets of adult drama. CNN discovered the popularity of the Continuous Video Crawl, and television has never looked back: no matter what's on the main stage, there's always something else you'd better be paying attention to. There's always something else happening. Better pay attention, or you'll get behind.
If there's not enough fear to go around, television reality shows are ready and waiting to top us up. Intelligently-written screenplays get blown off in favor of jealousies that threaten mock-celebrities' survival on islands deserted except for a large camera crew flanking the craft table. Okay, I'm a Sorkin junkie, but I'm going to miss Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip.
I was strapping into my car last week and noted with dismay that my normal startup routine included automatically plugging my cell phone wire into my ear, and taking the GPS out of the glove box and suctioning it onto the windshield and waiting while it found signals from three satellites that together could tell me the fastest way to get where I was going. How many things can I really, truly, pay attention to at once without figuratively – or, worse, literally – crashing?
We were going to do aerobics. We were going to be beautiful forever. Feel the burn, feel the burn, urged Jane Fonda. Now we can no longer feel the burn. We're just feeling burned out.
"We didn't start the fire," Billy Joel reminds us. Perhaps not, but how much did we feed it? How much did we feed on it? Bathe in its light? Get singed by its heat? Get hypnotized by its sinuous gyrations? Let it suck down our oxygen and our attention? Seasoned campers know that you only need a small fire to cook your food. A bonfire, with its leaping flames and high-flying snapping sparks, has its place: for entertainment, magic, ceremony and ritual. But it will burn your food, and may incinerate your home, if it gets out of control. It wastes scarce resources that cannot be quickly replaced and become more and more costly to feed if it burns unchecked.
The Boomers have been in fight-or-flight mode for half a century. Many of us don't know how to do anything else. We are adrenaline junkies. We live in the hope that something better will come along. We've been propelled by the world around us to move along, get ahead, create better living through electricity, strive for space...the final frontier, beat the communists, beat the terrorists.
It's a basic principle of physics that if you run anything – animal, vegetable, mineral – continuously and near its limits for long enough without recovery, it fails. Systems run too close to their limits without adequate safeguards fail. Two space shuttle accidents shook NASA's and
When we look around us, it's easy to conclude that all the striving has been for naught. There's no permanent defeat of Bad Guys, who are winning the game of global Whack-a-Mole...that is, if you still think in terms of black and white at all. When we think about treatment of prisoners in
We grew up in a world that placed its trust in us as we took up the torch of hope and progress in our firm grip. What if we're losing? As we look around, have we faltered? And what would be worse: to have failed, or to have failed to find someone besides ourselves to blame for the failure? Because surely if we're not moving ahead, we must be moving backward.
Either way, we're tired of running. We've been racing our whole lives. We're tired of striving on behalf of the whole human race, driving to distraction and back. We're just plain out of every human resource we came into this world with. If our kids haven't moved back in with us, then our parents may have...if we're not caring for both at once. We're stressed. You can hear it in our voices. You can see it in our faces. You can see it in the bills some people can afford to pay for plastic surgery to keep it from showing up in their faces and bodies and psyches. For the rest of us, it's showing up in our medical records, and is going to keep right on skyrocketing in terms of both total fiscal burden and social consequences in society. Millions of us cling grimly to jobs that drain us, in work environments bereft of joy or inspiration, waiting for the one promise we think the system will deliver, no matter what else has been stripped away: retirement benefits and economic security. And how many of us are shocked, discouraged and depressed to discover that even that's not going to be there if and when we let go, so we might as well keep the chair warm where we are because they can't make us leave yet?
When we live in a world surrounded by media that's paid for by corporate advertisers that support the content that attracts the most attention – fear and bad news – we've got to work harder to find the inspiring, the uplifting, stuff. There's less of it, and it has to work a lot harder to get through. Oprah Winfrey digs deeply to get the coverage she does for life's uplifters. The late Peter Jennings put it out there when he featured "ABC's Person of the Week".
Remember that at the bottom of Pandora's box, after she let loose all the scourges and plagues into the world, was one final thing: Hope. Yes, we live in a world with Osama bin Laden and AIDS and whatever the next pandemic will be named. We also live in a world where Bill and Melinda Gates have created such a compelling effort to work on the world's most intractable problems that other billionaires like Warren Buffet are joining forces with them. A world where rock stars and former presidents acknowledge the responsibility that comes with celebrity and leverage that celebrity to advocate for change.
Those are exactly the boomers that are walking that talk, that are the leaders of the generation to whom JFK passed that torch and who are holding it high. They are creating the change that we were charged with and somehow feel like we never achieved. So they are also the ones who make us feel like we haven't measured up...the people who make us feel like sea slugs.
But what if the task before us is not just the big-picture change-the-world? After all, so few of us are ever going to be in a position to do that. What if we started to look at the next neighbourhood park cleanup as something more than a tiny, near-invisible speck of effort in a world that needs so much more? What if we re-channelled just a fraction of the energy it takes to compose and toss out a disparaging comment about our workplace and instead presented a single statement of pure positive hope? Of optimism – about anything? And notice what that felt like – both to say, and to watch how others around us respond to that?
What if we played with that for a while, and made more of a practice of actively seeking and highlighting the positive where we live and work? No, I'm not advocating "Take Miss Pollyanna to Work" Day. I point to the proverb, "Better to light a single candle than to curse the darkness".
What if the job that is now before most of us isn't to further decode DNA, find and figure out how to manipulate the genes that cause cancer, or get the world to agree with our views on the ethics and practice of human cloning? What if our job – the job of every one of us ordinary non-celebrity human beings, is to bring healing in every way we can, large and small, to the world around us? To live in a way that fosters and reflects the kind of world we want to live in, the kind of world we want to pass along? To live more lightly on the planet, work to minimize our carbon footprint, find new ways to recycle? To remember that the effect of any positive energy, any positive choice or remark or intention we put into the world is multiplied tenfold in the Universe at large, even if we ourselves might not see the effect?
Sound attractive – at least, more attractive than how you'd otherwise spend your day and your energy? Would it be easier and maybe have a stronger effect if you were not alone in your efforts? It's possible. Whole communities are coming together – micro, in small gatherings in workplaces, to larger ones in neighbourhoods and cities and regions, to ones of people linked electronically who might never meet in person.
In the next article, we're going to give you a close up look inside some of those communities, how they work, why their members choose to work together, and how they have changed not only themselves but the world around them in ways more powerful and positive than they could possibly have imagined when they began.
Sullivan, the lead scary blue monster, learns from the tiny tot in the movie, "Monsters Inc."that joy is many times more powerful than terror. I liked that. I liked it a lot. Because I want to believe that the Universe is a just and benevolent place, that when people of good soul never, never, never give up, and just keep putting good intentions and thoughts and deeds out there into the world, no matter how bleak it may seem, that the cumulative force of that effort reaches Malcolm Gladwell's Tipping Point, becomes the last little critical "YOPP!"
In fact, I leave you with the reminder of the Yopp. You remember the power of the Yopp, don't you? We children of the sixties are so lucky – we grew up with so many wonderful guides. This one comes from the fable of the sage Theodore Geisel, and his exhortation to not give up, that every voice counts because you can never tell whose voice will suddenly mean that we are all heard:
And, just as he felt he was getting nowhere,
And almost about to give up in despair,
He suddenly burst through a door and that Mayor
Discovered one shirker! Quite hidden away
In the Fairfax Apartments (
A very small, very small shirker named Jo-Jo
was standing, just standing, and bouncing a Yo-Yo!
Not making a sound! Not a yipp! Not a chirp!
And the Mayor rushed inside and he grabbed the young twerp!
And he climbed with the lad up the
"This," cried the Mayor, "is your towns darkest hour!
The time for all Whos who have blood that is red
To come to the aid of their country!" he said.
"We've GOT to make noises in greater amounts!
So, open your mouth, lad! For every voice counts!"
Thus he spoke as he climbed. When they got to the top,
The lad cleared his throat and he shouted out, "YOPP!"
And that Yopp…
That one small, extra Yopp put it over!
Finally, at last! From that speck on that clover
Their voices were heard! They rang out clear and clean.
And the elephant smiled. "Do you see what I mean?…
They've proved they ARE persons, no matter how small.
And their whole world was saved by the smallest of All!"
1 comment:
ok, so what was that actually originally written for?
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