Twenty years ago, I dragged Yorkton This Week editor Murray Lyons into my school newspaper office during a career day, handed him a handful of newspapers, and asked him to critique it. Two weeks later, he asked me to add 150 words to one of my columns, because he would like to run it. Would I be willing to write a column every two weeks?
The first publication of my column was March 20, 1992, 20 years ago this week. I was 17 years old, in Grade 11, and editor of the Yorkton Regional High School newspaper, The Regional Rap. Now older, fatter, uglier, definitely more married and fatherly, and just perhaps slightly wiser, I am still writing.
Looking back, that first column has set the tone for the thousand-plus columns that followed.
Here it is, under the headline "An echo boomer wonders, where is the good life now?"
We were all born 20 years too late.
Just think about it. Nothing that our generation has is considered "good" anymore. Drug warfare is in the streets of larger cities. Poverty, especially for children, is on a dramatic rise the world throughout. Radio stations won't even play our music anymore. Instead they play "golden oldies," 20 -30 years old. We are the forgotten generation.
Between the late '40s and the '60s were born the "baby boomers." The baby boomers make up the largest age group of our society. They were the hippies of the '60s, the punks of the '70s, the yuppies of the '80s, and the middle-aged of the '90s. They have the money and the numbers. Obviously much of our business and infrastructure is set around them. We, the "echo" to the boom generation, are getting the leftovers.
The leftovers? Like what?
Think about it.
Our schools are being closed because of low enrolments. We may have to revert back to a system of boarding schools because it costs too much to have so many of them. The governments put in by our parents have spent more money that they didn't have than our children or even our grandchildren will be able to pay back. The AIDS epidemic is something we have to deal with. Our parents didn't.
Wanton disregard for the environment by the "me" generation over the past 40 years has left us to pick up the pieces and try to save our spoiled planet.
We don't have a united country. Our standard of living has fallen below what it was before, even though, on average, there are two providers in each family now, not one.
We have no hope of having social programs like Canada Pension Plan or Old Age Security, because the baby boomers will have bankrupted it.
Heck, we don't even get music good enough that radio stations will play anymore.
Many of these things will be next to impossible to correct in the space of our lifetimes. Things like AIDS and the national debt will be with us for a long time. But even that is irrelevant when we consider the state of our environment. Our parents' generation have burned more rain forests, polluted more air and water, overfished, overdeveloped and overpopulated than we can ever replace.
This makes me think of a song by Alabama, Pass it on Down, whose lyrics say, "Let's leave some blue up above us." The next time your parents tell you you've got it good, tell them to listen to that song. Let's see who's got it good.
- Brian Zinchuk is editor of Pipeline News. Over the past 20 years his column has appeared in the Preeceville Progress, Canora Courier, Norquay Northstar, Kamsack Times, Yorkton This Week, Saskatoon Journal, Rosetown Eagle, Battlefords News-Optimist and Southeast Trader Express. He can be reached at brian.zinchuk@sasktel.net
