BY GARY JOHNSON
Reprinted from Loose Change at TCBMag.com

Talking last week with a client about social media, she commented, “Facebook posts really provide me with a lot of thought-provoking information I otherwise would never find myself.” I mostly agree. It’s like having 500 peers on the lookout for interesting perspectives and thoughtful insights from the collective conscious. I have found that Twitter provides very much the same kind of access, though it’s mostly up to me to find it. I rarely find re-tweets of much value. Somehow FB is more substantive. I particularly am a fan of apps like Flipboard that aggregate information.

That said, there are volumes of crap on FB. From privacy-invading ads to schmaltzy Stuart Smalley bromides and games like Dr. Zoo Little to inane updates on trivial daily activities, it’s astonishing how some people burn up their precious time.

Then there are times when a post is important and enlightening.

One such post was of a column in the Washington Post’s Guest Voices section, written by Thomas Day, an Iraq War veteran, Penn State graduate, Catholic, product of Jerry Sandusky’s infamous Second Mile foundation, and a current graduate student at the University of Chicago.

The line in his column that really jolted me was: “I have fully lost faith in the leadership of my parents’ generation.” Given that he was referring to me, I decided to respond.

Dear Thomas,

I dig. The Boomer generation has, as you say, “failed over and over and over again.” Unfortunately, I can tell you that I felt exactly the same way about my parents’ generation when I was your age. I was 31 years old in 1980. By then, I was married with two children and a third on the way. I had “recovered” from the 1960s as best I could, but looking back I was probably even more jaded about the Greatest Generation than you are about the Boomers.

My mother married my father when they were in their early 20s while both were serving in the Marine Corps during WWII. Long story short, he left her with three kids and without any means of support. She grew up Catholic, so divorce wasn’t a choice at the time. We moved in with my grandmother, a seamstress. Mom got a teaching degree. We attended Catholic schools and worked from the time we were able to stand on a street corner selling newspapers or able to lug golf bags for rich guys. Work and the Catholic schools kept me, my brother, and a lot of our lower-class friends out of jail.

For better or worse, our faith instilled a sense of right and wrong. Too, we had an immovable loyalty to the government and country following WWII, until the ’60s literally blew up that world before our very eyes. It was as if someone was pulling the rug out from under our belief system every time we turned around. For the first time, an American military intervention proved it had nothing to do with defending personal freedoms. Worse, it killed off 60,000 of our peers and friends, mostly guys who were conscripted into the service. Many came back unwelcomed, psychically or physically wounded, irreparably so. Sound familiar? The Watergate scandal exposed not only the lying, cheating, and ruthless disregard for the law among Washington’s revered elite, but the investigative press was uncovering outrageous sexual proclivities among politicians, including the gargantuan promiscuities of President John Kennedy, an absolute Godhead while growing up. Too, it was clear that the once lionized industrial titans whom our history books held up as the fathers of modern civilization were actually responsible for not only heinous child labor practices but the poisoning of our environment with industrial waste so toxic it was literally endangering life on our planet.

We watched as our parents, dressed as police, mayors, and upstanding citizens, hosed down black people on street corners, burned crosses in their yards, and plotted their deaths. We were shocked to discover that the very people we entrusted our morals and spirituality to, the men who transformed bread into the body of Jesus Christ every Sunday, were in fact no better than Jerry Sandusky or any number of pedophiles roaming the streets.

Prosperity? Most of my friends grew up in low-income households. My grandmother literally made our clothes so that county welfare wouldn’t take us from our mother. We worked at jobs most kids today would reject out of hand.

Sorry if this sounds like the “we walked five miles to school every day” crap we used to hear from our folks, but as they would say—“it’s true.”

Yup. Some of us enjoyed tremendous prosperity. Some of us gave back and some of us did not. I’m not making a case for our collective innocence. I’m no fan of a lot of my generation, frankly. I’m only saying that what you’re feeling is nothing new. Each successive generation looks back on its predecessor and thinks they messed things up. And they’re mostly right. The human race just doesn’t seem to be capable of accomplishing much more than baby steps from one generation to the next.

I am happy, as you suggest, to “get out of your way.” Honestly, I wish you nothing but the best. Things will improve, but in the meantime allow me to apologize for those idiot Boomers who dug you such a deep hole. Perhaps the generation after yours will look back on you and say for the first time in human history, “Those folks did a hell of a job.”

Just don’t bet on it, Tommy me boy.

Editor’s Note: Gary Johnson is President of MSP Communications in Minneapolis, MN and authors the blog Loose Change.