Dear Editor,
I try very hard not to walk this particular dark path, but there are times when I am overcome by a deep despair when I assess the kind of social, economic, and environmental legacies we will be leaving for my two grandsons.
They have come into a world which is rapidly becoming dangerously overcrowded, where the gap between the haves and the have-nots is widening, rather than diminishing, where the health of the natural environment continues to be compromised and unchecked growth and industrialization is depleting our natural resources at a frightening rate, and where ideological, religious, political and cultural divisiveness and conflict continues unabated.
Their young minds are bombarded by media and cultural messages telling them that the obsessive accumulation of wealth and one’s capacity for conspicuous consumption are more important measuring sticks of a person’s character and worth to society than their capacities for empathy, sympathy, generosity, or compassion, and they are learning far too early that there might not be logical or justifiable reasons to believe that our political, business, or religious leaders are either trustworthy or altruistic, or are interested in attending to anything other than their own ambitions and needs.
My grandsons are experiencing a culture that is working hard at trying to convince itself that happiness and fulfillment can only be achieved through the use of miniature technological devices, binary-code applications, and/or the consumption of particular products.
And they are passing through narrowly focused education systems that have less to do with the promotion of learning than they do with social engineering and the actualization of the goals of particular political/social/religious ideologies.
It is impossible to imagine what skills my grandsons will need to develop in order to eventually secure a decent life for themselves or even survive in the world they will be living in — I only know that given the evidence of our refusal to dramatically alter our priorities and behaviours they will have to have a lot more adaptability, flexibility, perspicacity, and resilience than was and is the case for those generations that have come before them.
We obviously continue to evolve technologically, but I see the question of whether or not our moral and ethical evolutions have kept pace with our technological growth as being the more important issue. This is the legacy I think about as I watch my grandsons learn about the world around them.
It has everything to do with how they grow and behave as human beings and very little to do with how quickly they can type a message with their thumbs or accumulate wealth.
Ray Arnold
Richmond
