I came across a blog today in the Huffington Post that reminded me of how widely perceptions swing over the course of living life.

In the post, a "magical young woman" somewhere in her teens whispers a question toward the writer that gives her pause for thought: When did the future go from being a promise to being a threat?

The blogger, Lynda Resnick falls quickly into a gentle revelry ... "My generation had a flower as its logo -- today's symbol is a skull. A mosquito buzzing around the room is no longer the bearer of an inconvenient bite, but a potential West Nile virus. The summer floods in the Northeast are not just a heavy rainstorm, but a deluge of rising seas in the climate change doomsday scenario" ... then slams the present day for it's lack of role models, abject poverty, war, and so on.

She then chides our generation for allowing children like the "magical young woman" to inherit "... our world without doing more and trying harder to correct our wrongs", and actually says:

This is the first generation I know that doesn't embrace a future more golden than that of the previous generation.

Horse hockey!

Ms. Resnick, wake up and smell the napalm.

I know this is going way out on a geezer-tangent-limb here, but this up-and-coming generation of cell phone-toting, hundreds-of-dollars-worth-of-shoe-wearing, must-have-the-latest ... or else! ... Paris Hilton adorers really needs to get over itself.

Okay, okay … the world is not a perfect place, and there are many, many people in it that take pleasure out of things that are messing it up even further. The global warming chickens are coming home to roost, and there will be hell to pay for fossil fuel dependency, failures to address world issues of poverty and disease, shaky alliances formed for short-term gains, and and so on.

Greed is so ‘in’ these days that it’s hard to find a pure agenda or a clear conscience in anyone over a certain age (about 6?), and as the global population grows and the world gets smaller and more crowded, there are more people looking to grab just that much more than the next guy ... just for the heck of it.

But are the precious darlings now approaching adulthood the first to perceive the future as something less than golden? Are these children of peace and affluence ... and even the poor in America are so much better off than so much of the rest of the world that the words fit for them, too ... being left holding a bag the rest of us never saw until we filled it with yuck and handed it over?

Continued in the next post.