The Coffers and the Cradle: A Dispatch on What We Are Wasting
So, lets talk about the legacy we’re building for our children. And for that matter, a predicament for ourselves.
You probably already know that I’ve been a lot of things in my life. I’ve been the scared new troop, the angry man, the NCO, the father. I have made a lifetime of mistakes, and I am trying to learn from every one of them. And from where I stand now, as a man who has seen all of those sides, we are failing.
We are a nation obsessed with our own grievances, drowning in a “now” of manufactured outrage. We are so busy teaching our children who to hate, who to fear, and who to blame that we have forgotten to teach them what is worth loving. We are so focused on the next fight that we are refusing to offer the olive branches that could prevent it.
And in this chaos, we are, by our own hands, throwing away our two most valuable assets.
First, we are squandering our past. We are ignoring the “coffers of knowledge and experience”—our elders. We have a generation of men and women who have lived through real hardship, who built this world, and we treat them as if they are disposable, “outdated” models. We dismiss their wisdom as irrelevant. And in doing so, we are guaranteeing that our children, and our children’s children, will be “doomed to rebirth the cycle” of our own stupid mistakes, because we have deliberately and arrogantly burned the history books.
Second, we are squandering our future. We are alienating the young. We are so busy screaming about the superficial—their hair, their clothes, their attitude—that we are failing to see their potential. We are failing to see that these are the very people we will desperately need when the systems we’ve built, the ones we’re too complacent to fix, finally break down. These are the people who will have to “help us feed ourselves” when the trucks stop running.
This isn’t a game. This is our one, short, precious life on this rock.
I am not asking you to be a pacifist. I am not a Ghandi. I have been to places where “peace” is a word from a different language.
I am asking you to be a parent. To be a leader. To be the “adult in the room.”
The mission is simple. Stop teaching our children how to fight our old, bitter wars. Start teaching them how to build a better house. Offer the olive branch. Find the common ground. Remind them, and remind yourself, that we are all worthy of each other’s time, and they are all worthy of our love.
This is how we break the cycle. This is how we give them a legacy that is not just a pile of our debts