I remember the first time I thought that my parents were completely misguided. Uninformed. Ignorant. Closeminded. Out-of-step. Their thinking was old, stale, outmoded, steeped in a value system that was intolerant and unenlightened. And I remember thinking, I will never be like them. Never. Because their generation was not just benignly stupid, their ignorance was malignant. No, I told myself, I will never be like them because of all the harm they had done and were doing to the world.
I just never thought I'd be so much worse.
The first time I determined how bad my parents were had to do with a PSA (Public Service Announcement). It was the Woodsy Owl "Give A Hoot Don't Pollute" campaign. I was about 7 or 8 years old in the early 1970s. I watched a lot of after-school TV back then and Woodsy Owl seemed ubiquitous. These were the days when a new era of global consciousness was emerging, brought about by the famous "Earthrise" photo taken from space by the NASA Apollo 8 Mission. The image of our fragile little blue marble of a planet floating in the dark vast vacuum of lifeless space resonated. Suddenly millions of people gained a new perspective on how rare and precious our biosphere was, spawning a worldwide movement of environmentalists. We now understood that it was incumbent upon us to take care of our fragile planet. Not waste its valuable and scarce resources. And we had to keep our environment clean. Polluting was a sin.
In those days, my dad took my brothers and me skiing in the nearby Laurentian mountains or in Vermont every weekend in winter. He loved to ski more than anything. Being up on the mountain, carving his way elegantly down the tree-lined slopes, was the only time I ever saw my father genuinely happy. He would sing as he made his flawless S-turns. Sometimes he would faux-yodel, his way of reminiscing about his greatest skiing experience in Zermatt, Switzerland when he was a bachelor. Skiing with my father initiated me into the beauty and magnificence of nature. Riding up the chairlift with him, suspended in the air as we were lifted on a cable up the dangerous, rocky, ice and snow covered mountainside to the wind-swept peak above. When we allowed the force of gravity to pull our bodies downhill at great speed we felt in synch with the awesome power of nature, and I felt in synch with him, as father and son. It was the only time I ever felt that way.
Then one day, as we were heading to the slopes, I realized something else about my dad. Something unexpected and disturbing. My father was a phoney. He wasn't actually the mountain-loving, mother-earth loving, nature-loving man I thought he was. My dad was smoking in the car as usual. He was a pack-and-a-half a day smoker most of his life. He'd even puff his tobacco sticks on his way down the slopes. He'd slip his pack of cigarettes out of his parka pocket on the chairlift, daintily take off his gloves, place them precariously on his lap, and somehow extract and manage to flick a flame out of his Bic lighter. He'd heave out a cloudy puff of steamy breath into the frozen air, intermixed and indistinguishable from exhaled tobacco smoke.
But my realization about my dad had not come on the slopes or even on the chairlift. It came in the car on the way there. Our car was always filled with cigarette smoke on our 90-minute drive to skiing. I estimate that by the time I was 15 my lungs were equivalent to those of a habitual smoker. On this particular day, as he had done hundreds of times before, my dad pulled out a fresh pack of Craven-A while driving, unwrapped the cellophane, took out the silver paper, rolled down the window (our car didn't have power windows) and tossed it out onto the highway at 70 miles an hour.
After months of having imbibed the message of Woodsy Owl my assessment was as incontrovertible as it was horrible: My father was a litter bug. Woodsy had told us to be vigilant for deplorable types like him. And when we saw an offence against our pristine planet, it was incumbent upon us as conscientious global citizens to intervene. I stared at my father disapprovingly, feeling incapable to respond because he was a hard man who would not be easily challenged, and I felt doubly bad since we were on our way to ski, and didn't want to ruin the only time he was ever happy. I felt ashamed of my impotence. It's probably part of the reason I don't ski anymore, and haven't since my mid-twenties. Some types of shame never leave you.
That moment was the first time I can remember vowing to myself that I would never be like my father. His act of thoughtlessly throwing garbage out the window of the car demonstrated how ignorant and careless he was. This was the beginning of years of observing all the ways in which my parents were inexcusably unenlightened, and my self-righteous commitment never to be like them. I'd live my life with respect for mother nature and for my fellow humans, I repeated to myself. I'd raise my children, if I had children, to understand the consequences of their behaviour, to both their fellow and to the fragile planet on which we all lived and depended. My disdain for my parents, and their generation of ignoramuses grew.
Of course, now that I've had kids of my own, I understand my parents better, and in retrospect, the self-righteousness of my youth disgusts me. Still, for many years I managed to convince myself that I had turned out better than them. After all, I am more educated (thanks to them) and certainly more informed. I grew up in a generation marked by environmental consciousness. In my family household we always did what we could to live according to wholesome values, recycling and trying not to be wasteful. We did our best to raise our kids to be thoughtful, caring, and responsible. One thing is for sure, my children will need every bit of fortitude and energy they can muster. Because the world they are inheriting from me and my generation is a shitshow.
The reality is that we were/are far worse than our parents, my generation I mean. I blamed my parents for the ignorance of their generation, so it's only fair that I take responsibility for the selfishness, entitlement, carelessness, and moral bankruptcy of mine. We had our chance to prove we could take corrective action over the last 30 years. The verdict is in and we've failed miserably. In fact, we've made it worse.
I got a hint of what was to come when I was in graduate school. It was the decadent late-80s and everyone I knew, all the smart, ambious, well-educated middle and upper class kids of my cohort, the so-called 'leaders of tomorrow', only had one thing on their minds: making shitloads of money. These were the heady days of investment banking, mergers and acquisitions, and twenty-five year old hedge fund and junk bond millionaires. It was the era of personal computing, the tech-stock boom, and consumption on a scale never before imagined. We celebrated ourselves excessively, in a way not seen since the 'Roaring 20s' (and we know how that period ended). "We Are the World" the assembled pop stars sang in 1985 to raise money for the poor starving people of Ethiopia, making us all feel like we were not just brilliant and talented, but that we were using our gifts and good fortune to do some good in the world too. USA For Africa led by child-star cum developmentally-delayed man-child "King of Pop" Michael Jackson was our deformed grotesque emblem. Instead of singing "We Are The World" we should have been singing "We Are The Worst."
The coming of age of my generation in the 80s was a prelude to the corruption and financial collapse of the 90s, and the monstrous injustice brought about by decades of greed and growing economic disparity. It's hard not to see a straight line from the under-class stagnation of the 80s to the political and civic bankruptcy of today. In the last 20 years, social media has simply been a mirror of our hideous (Michael Jackson-esque) reflection. What was initially touted as a saviour, a panacea ushering in an information age of freedom and empowerment for the masses, quickly descended into a cesspool of degradation, indecency, conspiracy and misinformation. Nowadays our children are hooked like heroine addicts on devices that have turned them into despondent suicidal nervous wrecks. Is there any wonder cynicism is so widespread and authoritarianism on the rise? Woodsy Owl, where are you? He probably died in a forest fire generated by man-made climate change. We have no other generation to blame but our own.
The reason for all this reflection and regret? Must be that Rosh Hashana, the Jewish new year, is once again upon us. A time of year to take responsibility for our actions, beg forgiveness from those who we have wronged, and pray for a favourable outcome. I’m not much for prayer, and it’s too late to apologize to my parents for my self-righteousness, they're both gone. But my bigger fear is that it may be too late for forgiveness from my kids too.
