I can’t help but think that the world is going to hell in a hand basket but I know that such feelings have been the stock-in-talk of all older generations since the dawn of time. It can’t be that this time the old worrywarts (us, this time) will be proven right, can it?

I’ve never been right before.

I won’t bore you by citing all the reasons I feel this way. I am sure that you have a sense of it on your own. The main one, as I just confessed, is my age. Hormones must be part of it, eh?

But I am thinking that it is not so much my age that is important, rather it is the age of the society in which we are living. Our systems are old. Our institutions are on life-support. Our governments are dinosaurs. Even the infrastructure is decaying. The problem isn’t me getting old – it is that everything we rely on is getting way-too-long-in-the-tooth.

Especially for this uber-fast-changing world.

Our generation’s ideas are now too old to work as well as they once did. The institutions we spawned are boring, unimaginative and too concerned with self-preservation. They are too arthritic to move with the fast times.

The programs we rely on are inefficient and ‘in-the-way’. They are not part of the solution but part of the problem (germ ridden hospitals, for example, DFO for another). And they resist change (the RCMP for example). They are corrupt (our political/corporate/financial institutions for example). Our industries are so old they died collectively as the Sunset Group. Those that survived moved offshore (patriotism is not built into the corporate DNA). The generations that energized the world in the fifties, sixties and seventies, are too old to keep it up without Viagra. And the societal structures we created and supported are hoary and decrepit.

Face it, we just can’t ‘do the job’ anymore.

So, I look to the younger generation. And I see Christy Clark, our very own Sarah Palin. I see Stephen ‘Suckhole‘ Harper, our ambassador to the corporate world. And, sadly, I see an increasingly weakened Obama fighting an extremely uphill battle and not gaining much ground.

I am not encouraged.

To be fair, the next generation has been ‘on hold’ for awhile. The ‘turnover’ of conventional jobs just wasn’t there for them. We baby-boomers not only kept all those jobs but we held on tightly to what we could as the ‘old-time’ jobs went offshore. It is hard to get your father’s job at the mill when he was let go himself at 50 and has been unemployed ever since.

That generation ‘on-hold’ is starting to make inroads, however. Our Federal Public Service hasn’t had as young a ‘profile’ since the second world war. Same for Worksafe BC and the Provincial government sector. Sadly, those are the three areas that young people should avoid like the plague. But, I digress…..

In theory, that new blood should help invigorate. But I am not so sure it will. You can put a younger jockey on an older horse but it is not going to run any faster because of that. Some kind of revolution is long overdue. We need more than young blood, we need fundamental changes.

Could the world really be going to hell in a handbasket after all? Or will we revolt in time?