The Clash Between Generations

[Johannesburg, August 29, 2002] Fifty-five year old activists stand at the periphery of the UN Plenary Hall, smiling, laughing, and talking with each other. Their skirts or khaki trousers slightly creased, flat sandals, and ethnic jewelry as significant identification tags as the NASREC Non Governmental Organization badge around their necks. Their chatter a rebellious subtext against the world policy makers on stage. These are a generation of dedicated activists, without whose concerted effort, passion, intensity, perseverance, and often anger, many important issues would never have gotten addressed on national levels and international forums.

Why is it then, that their informality, assured stance, and battle language seem, well, dated? Why is it that the youth they have accompanied to mentor in the ways of positive policy change seem more acclimatized to that fact of interconnection, to the “globality” of this global world?

In the bleachers sit an amalgamation of youth with tattooed backs and multiple pierced ears, pastors and missionaries, and a smartly dressed contingent in their forties, neither ex-activists nor corporate propagists. Sociologically, it is an intriguing mix, an expression in dress and perspective of the cracking shift of our times, from one pre-global generation to whatever may be coming next, the new paradigm not quite hatched, but tapping at the shell between eras, generations, and stages of human evolution.

The youngest of the activists were born into a vastly different era. The sixties, Beatles, Vietnam were already history. The AIDs pandemic had begun, irrevocably changing the face of “free love.” The internet, that Christmas gift to top all gifts from corporate Santa, provided them with access to the entire world, and a communication web that knit together the loose ends of threads dangling between the people’s ‘US’ and corporate/government ‘THEM.’

The friction between the generations crackles at times, like static in the translation earphones. Youth lacks the experience, age clings to outdated adversarial paradigms. Youth is convinced that there is much to be done, boomers, without stopping their dogged fight, transmit the cynicism of a bygone era, a been-there-done-that fatigue that dulls the delicate sensors that impel us forward into the future.

This is part of the complexity of the situation, part of the challenges sustainable development presents. Confronted by the global crisis and all its facets, we are being called to reach beyond ourselves just to meet the times. To grope, part blind, for the revelation of the next steps, the ones that will bring about a new order for our species and for the world.