The death of Bin Laden was a ying and yang thing for me. Of course, I was happy that we finally got him. I care not whether he went down in a blaze of gunfire or was captured and buried alive with a feeding tube in the new towers being built.
What saddened me most was the reaction of a segment of our society that seems to be totally consumed by hatred these days for anything that flies in the face of their own very limited belief system. People who seem to hate so much that they have closed themselves off to all logic and reason.
Now, I’m not a huge fan of the president. I think he’s OK. I didn’t vote for him though. I don’t always like what he does. But the same has been true for every president that has been in office since I was born.
However, I was taught as a child to have respect. I respected my parents and elders. I respected my teachers. I never called them by their first names. I didn’t even call my college teachers by their first names. And on Facebook, Mr. Gleason, my high school teacher, is still Mr. Gleason, not Dale.
I have the same respect for any president. As I said, I don’t always agree. Sometimes I vehemently disagree. But I never get into the gutter and name call. The position and the man or woman in the position deserves respect. It’s the way I was taught. I wish we had all been taught that.
I guess I had high hopes when I was young. I grew up in the most contentious of times. It was the 1960s. The anti-war movement was at a fevered pitch, ROTC buildings were being burned, rioters were being beaten in the streets of Chicago, we were immersed in an unpopular, un-winnable war, desegregation had just begun, and we had just had two of our heroes, Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, cut down by madmen.
And yet, we seemed to have more civility back then than we do now. We seemed to accept our differences and while we disagreed, we never really got in the gutter like we do now.
Some say it was the Peace and Love movement of the hippies that fostered that civility. But I think it was more likely due to our parents, who taught us about respect, honor, being a good citizen, respecting authority and having acceptance.
Maybe I’m just a throwback to another time. I never judge someone by the color of their skin, their religious beliefs, which side of a manmade border someone happened to come from, their sex or sexual orientation — none of that nonsense.
But I do judge people by their character. And yesterday on Facebook, I learned a lot about a few people who are otherwise “friends” on this social network.
When the towers fell, I supported the president 100 percent. We had a right to defend ourselves. I didn’t agree with invading Iraq summarily and without cause. Still don’t. But he was the president and still deserved the respect of the office.
The same is true of the guy who ordered the mission against Bin Laden. Whether you like him personally or not, or even his politics, he deserved the respect of the office and for having the guts to approve a mission that had a 60% chance of succeeding. But yet, there were some people who couldn’t wait to take a moment of great historic importance — one that requires great reflection and introspect — to bash the president for absolutely no reason at all.
Now this isn’t about the president. It’s about our lack of respect. It’s about us being pulled apart at the seams as a nation because people are so full of what I can only call hate – hate for our leaders, hate for illegal immigrants, hate for Muslims – that we seem to be no longer one nation, indivisible. We are instead a nation divided, perhaps more so than we were even in the 1960s.
Oddly, it doesn’t appear to be the younger generations spreading such hate and division. It’s seems to be the Boomers – the hippies, the dreamers, the ones who were going to change the world. And yet, they seem to have given up. They have become curmudgeons, bitchers, whiners and naysayers, more interested in protecting their own wealth and power (the very things they so despised in their youth) than helping their fellow man.
Is it because we have given up on our world? Is it because our hopes seem so unattainable that we’d rather wallow in what makes us different rather than what makes us all the same?
I think Watergate was the crack in the floodgates. We stopped being a nation of dreamers and started to distrust everyone and everything. We became pessimists. We now live in our own little safe houses in our gated communities and tune into the endless drivel that comes from the mouths of pundits with something to sell us. We lost the inspiring voices of our generation – the Bobby Kennedys and Martin Luther Kings – and settled for the shrills of shills like Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh.
We no longer seem to think for ourselves but let others do the thinking for us. We immediately spread obvious mistruth as truth, never vetting the information on our own, but merely passing it on like mindless drones. Hell, we can’t even copy the right quote by Martin Luther King.
In doing so, we make a historic choice. We choose to divide our society rather than heal it. We waste our limited energy to point fingers at others rather than looking honestly at ourselves. We can go on and on about what’s wrong with our country and our world, but we do nothing to fix it. Instead, we walk swiftly by a stranger in need because we are more afraid of our differences than the things we have in common.
It is a sad time for me. I thought we, the Boomers, would have done a lot better with the world that we were given. We had such high hopes, such big dreams. But like the generation who gave us our lives, we have simply become dour and disdainful and wishful for the “good old days.” The glass isn’t even half full anymore; we are down to our last drop. We are leaving less to our children and grandchildren for we have lost the ability to believe that tomorrow will be a better day and that our best days lie ahead. We have lost the hope that was our birthright.
The hippies are gone, it seems. Long time passing. And we have only ourselves to blame.
Out on the Treasure Coast still believing that the best is yet to come, if we choose to make it so,
— Robb