Through the Perspective of History
A young person said to me recently that he'd nearly lost hope because everything seemed like it was crashing down. The world seems headed for doom -- economically, politically, spiritually. He's hardly alone in this observation. Even older people, who have experienced more and have other crisis points to compare with the present day, express the same fears. I pointed out to him that it has always been this way. History is full of struggles interspersed with brief moments of comfortable prosperity, and every generation has said things like what is this world coming to? and kids today are disrespectful/don't have a work ethic/are irresponsible, etc, in my day we did things differently. What we need, now, is a bit of perspective -- and not just our own. We need the perspective of history. Imagine life for young people one generation ago. For me, that's the era 1930-1970 or so (I was born in 1968). They were born into the Great Depression, and even for people who weren