Hell In A Handbasket

Grateful for new blood

It was during one of those late-life doomsday conversations, with friends who are within range of my age.

“I hate thinking of the mess we’ve left for our grandchildren.” A mantra for those of us who have moved on from seeking to actively engage the morass, to spectator status.

“It’s far worse than anything we had to face,” is the clincher.

The world is going to hell in a handbasket, and we’re consigned to a passive place.

“I suspect every generation feels this way,” I said. “I remember my grandfather looking downcast as he lamented what he saw coming my way.

“I was born just before Pearl Harbor,” I said. “I remember having to pull down our shades so we didn’t become a target. No sooner had we won WWII, than we started losing men in Korea. And wondering when we, and/or the Soviets, would try a nuclear strike.

“I was part of a crowd in the student union at Penn, as we waited for the Soviet ships to reach the American blockade near Cuba, wondering if this was the moment.

“Not six months later President Kennedy was assassinated. Then Medgar Evers, Martin Luther King, Robert Kennedy.

“You fill out the rest of the list, and tell me today’s young people are facing an unprecedented challenge.”

The cottage we’ve rented has requires a code to open the front door.

It took me a week to remember that the code was four digits of one of our many digital devices. For some reason (yes, Robert Hur, I do know the reason) I had an especially hard time remembering the code when I needed to enter it to lock again when leaving.

Gabe, our teenage grandson, was visiting, I told him the code once. When we were leaving one morning I asked him if he had entered the code to lock. “No,” he said. “But you have to,” I insisted. “No you don’t,” he said, “all you have to do is press that padlock image in the lower right.”

I’d been laboriously entering the code each time I left, for four months.

It’s not just that he instantly knew what I hadn’t. Nor that he has retrieved my internet countless times, and could set up my backup device, and the cameras I bought to pretend I was safeguarding the house…

but that he understands and sees through the quagmire that seems so threatening and incomprehensible to me.

No doubt our place in the world will end one day. Everything does. But it won’t be because of the young people to whom the tasks are falling. Maybe we were as skilled in making the most of what we faced, as they are.

But I find them awesome.