A Hopeless Generation

Our generation has nothing to look forward to but oblivion.  The entailments of this are terrifying: cloning, drugs, AIDS, suicide and euthanasia, alcoholism, broken homes, crime, child pornography, terrorism, and a host of other problems that are heartbreaking.  It is a short step from the “exploded” doctrines of the past to the disintegration of hope for the future.  Indeed, one author has observed:

In the 1950s, kids lost their innocence.  They were liberated from their parents by well-paying jobs, cars, and lyrics in music that gave rise to a new term—the generation gap.

In the 1960s, kids lost their authority.  It was a decade of protest—church, state, and parents were all called into question and found wanting.  Their authority was rejected, yet nothing ever replaced it.

In the 1970s, kids lost their love.  It was the decade of me-ism, dominated by hyphenated words beginning with self: self-image, self-esteem, self-assertion.  It made for a lonely world.  Kids learned everything there was to know about sex but forgot everything there was to know about love, and no one had the nerve to tell them there was a difference.

In the 1980s, kids lost their hope.  Stripped of innocence, authority, and love, and plagued by the horror of a nuclear nightmare, large and growing numbers of this generation stopped believing in the future.

I would add that in the 1990s, we lost our ability to reason.  The power of critical thinking has gone from induction to deduction and very few are able to think clearly anymore.  I have often said the challenge of the truth speaker today is this:  How do you reach a generation that listens with its eyes sand thinks with its feelings?

Ravi Zacharias in "The Real Face of Atheism," pg.99-100