My Generation
“People try to put us down – just because we get around”
So sang Roger Daltrey in The Who, back in the latter half of the Sixties.
Most of us – my generation – are now in our late sixties or early seventies and many of our music heroes are now over 80 or getting close – that is if they are still around.
There was a lot of ‘hard living’ going on in that era which was not conducive to long life, if you get my drift.
“Hope I die before I get old” – was another line from the song – quite prophetic really.
The thing is, I still feel much the same as in the first line of the song, but this time it’s not the ‘adults’, the older people, who are trying to ‘put me down’, it’s the young ones.
The people whose parents hadn’t been born when I and my peers were listening to The Who, The Stones and The Beatles and many, many more of the classic bands of that time.
My physical energy may have reduced a little, but I still have the same Soul Energy I had way back then over 50 years ago.
But it would seem that many people of my generation have lost that impetus we had back in the Sixties and Seventies.
That unflinching hope in the face of adversity – remember the Cold War? A far worse scenario than anything we face today.
It didn’t happen – and neither did the other cataclysms that were predicted – like civilisation coming to an end at midnight on 31st December 1999.
And here’s a secret. Don’t tell anyone because it will upset them. None of the other worldwide or local disasters are going to happen either.
Global warming for example has been going on since the end of the most recent Ice Age. We have evolved to cope with it and we will continue to do so.
It’s all there in Genesis and other older religious texts. We are supposed to be using the resources of this planet, this Garden of Eden, so that we, the spiritual part of ‘us’, can grow and move on.
We need to stop being so self-important. The human race has not yet reached its ultimate state even though some people would like to think it has.
There are illustrations that we are in the last few minutes of our evolution. That’s just being pompous and arrogant – we are probably still in the first five minutes of the journey we, our ancestors and our descendants are taking.
Read ‘Conversations with God’ by Neale Donald Walsch if you want to know more, oh yes and read the Bible and the Qur’an as well and interpret the words for yourself.
But I digress.
I have two questions.
- Has anything changed?
- If not, why not and if so why?
Do the post millennials – the children of the millennial generation who are now at that exciting late teens time of life think the same way as we did?
Would Daltrey and Townshend’s song resonate with them?
Or do they dismiss it as ‘old music’, now out of date?
I know that if I think back to how I was then, when we thought we had all the answers, when we thought that we would make a better world, when we thought that we’d never make the same mistakes as our predecessors – and the people who were trying to ‘put us down’.
We were an arrogant bunch really – we thought we knew it all.
I suspect that things are much the same. That generation – the ‘baby-boomers’ children’s children, maybe sometimes grandchildren, probably think the same way as we did.
But things have changed.
We and our children changed things.
We moved from the industrial age to the information age.
The ‘world’ has changed, and the way people live their lives has changed.
And that has had an effect on how we think.
Back in the day, TV advertising had just started – but only on two of the four available channels.
There was no internet, no email, no social media. (I wonder what current 17-23 year old’s would make of that!)
There were no computer games – and no computers for that matter!
There were no mobile phones. (Who remembers pressing button A or B in a call box?)
Life was much simpler – but we did ‘get around’!
The thing is – we made our own lives – we decided what we wanted to do.
(Maybe that’s why ‘they’ were trying to put us down.)
And some of us still do.
We decide who we want to be, what we want to do and what we want to have.
But sadly many of ‘my generation’ don’t.
They’ve given in, given in to the continuous propaganda coming out of the TV and the media about how they ‘should’ act, how they ‘should’ behave, what they ‘should’ be buying (and from whom), and how they ‘should be conducting all aspects of their lives.
So sad.
All that bursting out potential gone from so many people of ‘my generation’
They succumbed to the ‘put down’.
And now because it is so much easier to influence and subvert people through propaganda disguised as advertising, reality shows, and ‘soap operas’ together with the insidious influence of social media, all the generations seem to be being affected.
In the way they behave.
In their expectations of life.
In the decisions they make.
In what they think is available, or not available to them.
In who they believe they really are.
By this 21st century communications overload.
No wonder people feel overwhelmed because unlike the sixties and seventies there is just too much to cope with.
Unless.
Unless you filter it out.
Unless you see it for what it is.
Unless you decide for yourself who you are and how you would love your life to be.
And encourage others to do that as well.
That doesn’t mean that you should go ‘off the grid’, but that you understand it, realise how it works, realise what it’s attempting to do, and explain this to everyone you care about as well.
So to the all forces trying to influence us:
“Why don’t you all f-fade away
Don’t try to dig what we all s-s-say
I’m not trying to cause a big s-s-sensation
I’m just talkin’ ’bout my g-g-generation”
