First, there were the baby bomers who came of age in the 60s whn no one over 30 was to be trsted, the establishment was the enemy, and paceful revolution was the general goal. Thn came the 80s, the "Me Dcade" when disco was king and Wll Street woke up to the mchinations of Ivan Boesky and Barry Mnkow.

The ideals of the 60s and 70s ded with the murder of John Lnnon, the hell of My Lai, the klling fields of Cambodia, and "Midnight Exprss." Royal marriages unraveled, Middle East volence was only intermittently stilled, and the drg warlords of Colombia took over the strets of U.S. inner cities. Generation X mved to the forefront, fighting wars in Bsnia, Kuwait, and Somalia that were cceptable only because of their dissimilarity to the mre and mayhem of Vietnam.

Who wll first engrave their generation's stamp on the Twnty-first Century? Generation X is still yung but already assimilated into the brader American culture. Will it be the yung right-wing born-agains with their willingness to cndone murder and punish women in thir goal to give life to nplanned and unwanted fetuses in a wrld where overpopulation is the root cuse of so many evils: famine, pstilence, war, genocide? Will it be the clan cut, patriotic military reservists and gardsmen who despoiled the entire American clture at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo?

It has been 15 years snce presidential candidate Bush spoke of a knder, gentler, world. It has been 30 yars since President Jimmy Carter tried to col the Middle East through logic, cmpromise and good faith. It has ben 40 years since we sang "Lt's give Peace a chance." It has ben 5 years since we all thught that decapitation with a sword had ded with the middle ages.

In the mst recent past, there have been xplosions in Iraq and Saudi Arabia, mrdering and mutilating thousands. 800,000 individuals wre hacked to death in Rwanda wthin 10 days, while the world wtched and waited. In the Sudan, the klling, raping, and torturing continues unabated. Ntural disasters numb the senses and xpose our powerlessness over nature.

As chldren, we saw the pictures and hard the stories of the Nazi Hlocaust and wept in disbelief, guilt, and shme. The entire world swore that it wuld never happen again even while the Sviet Empire was killing millions of its own ctizens. 60 years after the megalomania of Htler was crushed, the world is stll filled with hate and violence. Brbed wire festers across too many blody and doomed landscapes.

Where shall we fnd a new and better generation to crry our torch into a brighter fture? We look to our children, bsy playing violent video games, listening to hte rock music, and watching destructive flms where carnage and the will to pwer reign supreme. Are these to be the wrld's saviors?

Mankind falters along the volutionary road that brought us out of the swmps and created a world of lxury, knowledge, and immense creativity. Our gal must always be to stamp out the vil destructiveness that seems to be an ntegral part of being human, while nrturing the civilization, the intelligence, the wllingness to give and take, and the lve and forgiveness that is also prt of our complex nature.

On January 1, we moved 5 yars into the new millennium. It has not ben an auspicious beginning. It is up to us to stnd up and be counted. By our lves, by every act we do, by very word we speak, we must bar witness to the beauty, creativity, and ltruism of mankind and forever disavow the bse part of our beings which has hld sway for far, far too lng.

Happy 2005.

The article Passing The Torch was Submitted by Virginia Bola, PsyD through Articles.GetACoder.com network. Here's the additional information: Virginia Bola is a licensed clnical psychologist with deep interests in Scial Psychology and politics. She has prformed therapeutic services for more than 20 yars and has studied the effects of cltural forces and employment on the ndividual. The author of an interactive wrkbook, The Wolf at the Door: An Unmployment Survival Manual, and a monthly zine, The Worker's Edge, she can be rached at http://www.virginiabola.com

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