Barbara Nicolosi, the screenwriter and founder of Act One, the movement to involve Christians in Hollywood, has hit the proverbial nail on the head when it comes to the threat to the Baby Boom generation …
As an institution charged with saving souls, the Church’s urgent outreach to fading Boomers must encourage them to face and take responsibility for the mistakes they have made. If they would be saved, the Boomer Generation must be guided into repentance for the way they self-righteously sacrificed all others as they fled from the simple heroism of adult human life. The rigid eradication of tradition, the gross materialism, the unbridled license, the embarrassing promiscuity—all always accompanied by shrill distortion and denial—have left our society disconnected, bloated, poorly educated, unable to trust, and simmering in resentment. I see many of my Millennial Generation students clamoring to set back the clock to a day before the Sixties, when there were grown-ups.
The eventuality of euthanasia as the ‘final solution’ for the damaged offspring of the Boomers to be ‘rid of’ the ‘ME’ generation is real and near at hand.
The Church’s secondary, but equally urgent pastoral challenge, is with the younger generations. Do not think me flippant in suggesting that pastors and teachers of the faith must quickly provide substantive, moral reasons for GenXers not to euthanize the Boomers; for them, the Entitled Generation will quickly morph into the Expensive Generation as they and Millennials are bent low under the weight of social programs that were strapped on their backs without their consent.
History is devastatingly cyclical. The Boomers made the case that they should end their marriages and abort their children for the God Expediency. Their children, stripped of any attachment to a moral framework, will eye the old grey hairs, drooling and in diapers—but certainly still sneering—and consider expedient “Death with Dignity” to be a sensible and pragmatic policy.
Then comes the question: “How can we help the younger generations break out of the resentment and emotional disconnect that has come from being the children of the Boomers?”
And given Nicolosi’s track record thus far, her suggestion at a solution is well worth considering:
I suspect the only way to reach the Millennials and Gen Xers, from a spiritual standpoint, will be with a powerful, renewed ethic of the value of suffering and the urgent need for forgiveness. We need hero stories perhaps more urgently than any generation of humanity that has come before.