Healing the Soul of America by Marianne Williamson

Author:Marianne Williamson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

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SEVERAL GENERATIONS MAKE up the “adult generation” of any particular time, and understanding how each generation fits into those before it can be helpful.

The boomers are aging, but we’re still here—and politically relevant. We are best understood when seen in terms of the psychological differences between us and our parents, the generation of Americans that fought World War II. This earlier generation surrendered five years of their lives to wage the war, and after that they wanted little more than to lie back on the couch, put their feet up on the coffee table, and drink another beer. God knows they deserved it. And seen from today’s perspective, they were an entire generation undergoing posttraumatic stress. People today can hardly imagine what it would mean to take on the Nazis for five years and not even go to therapy to discuss it.

General Eisenhower was the Supreme Allied Commander during World War II, and then President of the United States from 1952 until 1960. Eisenhower, with his unique vantage point for viewing the devastating effect of World War II on the generation that fought it, would have had a natural tendency to want to comfort people in the following years, to let them rest from too much strain, to at least unconsciously protect Americans from any further, critical public challenges. And thus the Fifties.

Then, of course, came the baby boom. Millions of us were thus brought up by mentally vacationing parents, and simply because we lived in the house with them we went on vacation, too! The difference between our generation and theirs, though, is that they had earned their vacation—and we did not. They had collectively given of themselves to make the world a better place, which awarded them a badge of honor they well deserve. Boomers never had that initiatory experience.

War initiated the World War II generation into bravery. Vietnam was an unjust war, not the just war that most people consider World War II to have been. And it speaks well of the baby boomer generation, not ill, that we rejected it on moral grounds. History challenged an earlier generation to wage war, and it challenged the next to wage peace. We began to do that, and then we stopped. A different kind of drama came our way.

Had the Sixties not happened, I think the baby boomer generation would have made its mark in the most glorious way. We had the leaders to lead us through the door marked “Glory,” but when they died, we felt the door shut in our faces. Like Moses leading the Israelites to the Promised Land but not being able to enter it himself, the Kennedys and King took us up to the door but they themselves could not walk through. Opening that door is a job still left unfinished.

For we who thought we would repair the world ended up contributing mightily to the mess. The baby boomer generation mastered the art of “making things better for me,” but has done too little to “make things better for us.

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