A Greatest Generation is being born for the 21st century from the carnage of this immoral war, in Gaza.

Photo by Tong Su on Unsplash

Each generation has a moment that defines its time and place in the history of human development 

My father's working class generation had greatness thrust upon them by the Great Depression which left them unemployed, starved, without access to medical care and living in precarious housing. Instead of surrendering their principles to capitalism they chose to stand in solidarity with the economic and politically oppressed. They accepted the sacrifices of WW2 to defeat Hitler under the proviso that when peace came, a new society would be built that was free of want, ignorance and ill health.

Our ancestors in 1945 said no more to slums, no more to an early death because of an inability to afford a doctor's care, and no more to lives constrained by wages insufficient to afford joy or hope.

The post-war Welfare State miracle lasted for thirty years. It was revolutionary because it made the the needs of the working classes as important to governments as the needs of the middle class, and 1%. The Welfare State would never have been born if the 200 years previous to that Golden Age hadn't been steeped in revolutions, industrial progress, and an independent news media's willingness to spread information about radical thinkers.

Considering the blood lost over the centuries by working people to forge a Welfare State where their existence was pleasurable and purposeful. Is loss is an evil of immeasurable proportion. The 1% were able to kill the Welfare State & replace it with a dystopian consumerism because well-paid Boomers in politics & business weaponized the news media to indoctrinate less well-off citizens that the good times would eventually trickle down to them if they voted for less taxation of the rich.

My generation, the Boomers will be remembered if history can survive our present era as the one who destroyed democracy, the environment and the social safety net to negotiate a better individual deal with the 1% for their  creature comforts.

The 2020s should have been a Renaissance for the Welfare State constructed with 21st-century sensibilities and it probably would have been had not the 1% stopped Corbyn from being elected British PM in 2019. Instead, four million kids go to bed hungry every night in Britain. 12% of beds in London Homeless shelters are occupied by refugees while many other asylum seekers kip down on the pavement of a city that boasts of having the most billionaires living in it.

Extreme wealth inequality is a deliberate by-product of capitalism that isn't tempered by taxation. It's not a mistake that the Great Cost of Living Crisis has left 23% of Canadians food insecure. Nor can it be fixed by food banks or school lunch programs because until you re-string the social safety net and ensure every worker and benefit claimant has a living wage, the chasm between the many and the few grows. There is a cruel logic as to why fascism is on the rise; you can't maintain this theft of wealth from ordinary citizens to the 1% without using the politics of Mussolini and Hitler. 

Yet in my pessimism, seeds of hope are germinating. The selflessness of the Greatest Generation in the 1940s may have skipped the Boomers but the millennials and Z’s may prove to have the right stuff to stop neoliberalism in its tracks. They have mobilised to fight capitalism's environmental destruction of our planet and they are standing against the war being fought against the Palestinians by not only Israel but, the US, EU, UK, Canada and Australia.  Their sincerity is as true as the millions of students and young people who opposed the Vietnam War in the 1960s and took to protests, sit ins, marches, and the peaceful resistance of the military industrial complex to stop the carnage.

I am not naïve. I know what these students are facing and what they will face if the war isn't stopped. They will be gas lit, denied employment, housing and further education. The student demos will probably end like Tiananmen Square, Kent State or the 1968 Prague Spring. But maybe they won't. What ever happens a resistance is building for the battles against authoritarianism to come in the very near future. These younger generations have a lot of guts so I stand with them as I can. But who I stand most with are all those young in Gaza and the West Bank, who had their futures stolen right out from under them by first the occupation and now this brutal, unnecessary and immoral war.

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