I was raised with the notion that education should, eventually, result in an adult capable of rational thought. This seems to have gone off the rails at some point because we see an increasing number of highly educated people who can recite facts and theories by rote – but can’t reason well enough to find their way out of a wet paper bag.

A wet paper bag that is open at one end. On a bright, sunny day. And has an exit sign.

Maybe I’m getting cynical – or maybe we were dumber than I thought we were when we were getting out of college. Or maybe we totally failed to educate the last generation – I’m honestly at a loss to figure out which.

I remember the hype of The Population Bomb . I was in high school and the book had actually been published years before but the argument hit the media again. So, the planet was doomed because pollution, humanity was doomed because nuclear war and now, if we didn’t blow ourselves to smithereens, we were going to all starve to death because babies.

And people wonder why Baby Boomers are neurotic…

So yes, we were dumb as college students, too. But at least we knew WHY we were trying to save the planet – and humanity. We reasoned that people were basically a good thing – what with the explosion of prosperity, cures for a score of diseases, and that whole putting a man on the moon thing – yeah, we were pretty sure that humans were a net good.

So we rolled up our collective little sleeves and went at this saving the world thing. In retrospect, we were doing then what a huge number of young people are doing now – trying to matter, to make a difference, to be super heroes.

Trouble was, our parents and grandparents had already saved the free world – twice. And freed a huge swath of the rest of the world while they were at it. So the Baby Boom went after the home front – only the reality was that our parents and grandparents had already laid a lot of that groundwork. We can take credit for doing our part – and rightly so – but the real victory was won by our parent’s generation. We marched on the National Mall – they were the ones who actually got the Civil Rights Act of 1964 passed.. We just conveniently ignored that fact for a few decades and went on with this saving the world thing,

But by the Seventies, well, all the good saving was already done. The environment still needed a bit of work so we helped get rid of smog and tried to save the birds – we may have overdone that last one a bit.

Anyway, life – that stagflation thing was pretty bad and we had a long slog into adulthood – and with it, real jobs. Then real downsizing – seriously, it’s a wonder that the Baby Boom wasn’t more neurotic that it was! But basically, we got busy having families, kids, mortgages, bills and feathered hair.

Sure, HIV was something – for a few years. Then it turned out that as horrible a disease as it was – and is – it didn’t have the potential to destroy humanity so we just let the government pass out condoms to everyone and pretended that the job was done. You couldn’t really save the world from something that couldn’t destroy the world. So we helped sew the quilt and did the candlelight vigils and took the kids to soccer practice.

By the time the Nineties rolled around, we were all too old to not know we weren’t really saving the world. Oh, we still pretended that all the peace marches back in the day and the umpteen times we showed up on the National Mall actually did something more than it did – but we were grudgingly having to admit that the stupid containment thing had kinda worked and that Rachel Carson had been an alarmist.

Well, okay – maybe not so much with Carson – we weren’t ready to totally give up on our ideals. By golly, we were still gonna save those whales and stop the acid rain – well, we’d kinda already done those things but we were still True Believers. So we voted for Clinton and packed the kiddos off to college.

Al ‘Can’t Win A Southern Florida County’ Gore decided that for an encore, he’d scare the pants off the planet. Enter Global Warming. Great, we could finally save the planet – and our kids were graduating and would be able to do the marching on the National Mall thing that we didn’t want to get out of our La-z-boys for anymore (look, for over a decade we hauled your collective little backsides all over the state so we could sit on concrete and pretend you weren’t tripping over your own feet in a mockery of every group sport every conceived – we earned some recliner time!).

Only, the thermometers decided not to cooperate and we had several years of record cold winters. Global Warming was promptly rebranded Climate Change and a bunch of us began to realize that our parents had been right – we didn’t know as much as we thought we did. Because last we looked, ‘climate change’ meant ‘seasons’.

Oh, there were plenty of hints along the way – amazing how we ended racial segregation and then integrated schools – and somehow, the kids we were supposed to be helping ended up with worse scores than when they were getting crappy separate schools. We knew that ending Jim Crow was the right thing to do – who knew that shoving kids into huge 30+ kid classes teaching at a grade level their age said they should be at but their preparation wasn’t and just passing them at the end of the school year so they wouldn’t feel bad that they couldn’t actually read or write at grade level was a bad plan?

Oh, yeah, our parents. They weren’t keen on the welfare thing either – and that’s not done anything it was supposed to do. And the whole sexual revolution fiasco that ended up with a multitude of divorces and a deluge of heartbreaking infertility. And it turned out DDT doesn’t damage bird eggs – not shooting up the place with lead pellets makes for much healthier bird populations than banning one of the safest pesticides in history.

It’s really, really aggravating when you figure out that your parents weren’t total morons. It’s even worse when you figure it out thirty years too late.

So, now we are in our golden years surrounded by our kids and grandkids – or at least someone’s kids and grandkids – and they are doing exactly what we taught them. They are out to save the world without the slightest clue what the heck they are doing. Just chips off the old blocks!

Only, were we really this dumb? Currently, the little darlings are preaching that animals have the same rights as humans and that there are too many humans – not that we’ll destroy ourselves with overpopulation, turns out Ehrlich’s population bomb bombed – but that humanity itself is an ecological problem. Never mind the obvious stuff like ‘play nice’ rather than telling others they shouldn’t exist – the whole premise is insanely irrational.

We wanted to save the planet for humans AND animals. We figured that as stewards of the world, we had an obligation to take care of it. It’s one of the few things we seem to have gotten right. Nah, they figure nature has a right to exist; humans and animals have equal rights and humans are naturally destructive.

So, let’s follow this logic (try not to giggle – and if you’re inclined to rationality, ya may want to take a couple Tylenol first). Nature has a right to exist. Humans are natural – just naturally destructive. Humans have equal rights with animals – and therefore no obligations to care for animals (you don’t have an obligation to care for an equal). So basically, as long as we don’t destroy nature itself, we can just act naturally – and destroy everything else.

Worse, there’s nothing in the rule book that says ‘life on Earth’ is the extent of nature. Heck, we can gleefully blow up the whole planet and not bother nature in the least! Whole universe of ‘natural’ stuff out there – Nature won’t miss just one little planet.

Personally, I’m on the tail end of the Baby Boom. There’s a slight chance I’ll be around long enough for the current crop (Generation Whatsis – I give up keeping track) to get old enough to realize, like we did, that a heck of a lot of what we thought we were doing to do good didn’t do the good we thought – mostly because we assumed we knew best and that the simplest solution was what we needed even when we didn’t actually understand the thing and the simplest solution was really just the laziest.

When that day does come, I am kinda curious if we’ll be telling our kids and grandkids that we told them so – or will we be telling the whales? Maybe we shouldn’t have saved them after all…