The intent of this blog is to present successive posts featuring excerpts from the book for your response.  These posts are meant to be discussion starters only on intergenerational communication  I would welcome your comments.

The subtitle of my book is derived from something I wrote in Octber 2011 in solidarity with the Occupay Wallstreet movement

Jeans, Suits and Skirts

What’s with these young kids in jeans camped out in public parks all over North America, shouting occupy this and occupy that?  There’s hardly any of them over 30 in the lot.  Shouldn’t they be in school or working or something?   Don’t they know that winter is upon us and they could freeze to death?  They are not really homeless, are they? They have warm places to go to.  Why don’t they just pack up and leave?

It is indeed a crying shame that these young people are left with no other form of protest to get their voices heard by the politicians and pundits who run the world.  As it is, grownup men and women in suits and skirts, who are most often the parents of the kids camped out, appear to have no clue why their children are so upset.   Nor do they seem to care.  The best they offer them is condescendence and disdain.

In the mean time the world is going to hell in a hand basket, while the ones in the know, the suits and the skirts, seem powerless to stop it.  That scares these young kids in jeans enough to camp out in the cold. But no one is listening to them and that is a terrible tragedy, because these young people’s actions are the voices of our tomorrow. 

“If only they would more clearly tell us what they want!” we hear time and again. And that is so much nonsense, because it is crystal clear what they want.  They want an end to a system where it is normal for one to better him or herself at the expense of their neighbour and a start to a system where each of us is busy being our next-door neighbour’s keeper.  Now, don’t ask these kids in jeans how to put this into practice.  That is a job for us suits and skirts.