I have always found the story and the music in The Lion King to be profound, particularly the crowd favorite The Circle of Life. Indeed without ever realizing it each generation endures similar challenges, common growing pains, battles to deal with the perceived problems of the era. There has always been a tension between the old guard and the new, a feeling that somehow the two worlds are incapable of fully understanding one another.

I’m a bonafide Boomer, okay? I was a free range kid on steroids like most of my friends. We went outside early each day and played wherever we chose until dark. I remember Halloween nights when my brothers and I would trick or treat until well after ten because our Catholic school gave us a holiday on November first. We lived on our bicycles and spent entire days roaming the nearby woods along the bayou with our friends. We stepped on nails and broken glass with our bare feet that were usually caked with dirt and dust.

Life seemed uncomplicated back then but it really wasn’t. We all knew someone who had become crippled from polio. Perhaps it was one of our teachers or a fellow student or even a neighborhood kid who mostly lived in an iron lung. Going under our desks for air raid drills became so routine that we appeared to have forgotten the underlying worry that there might one day be a nuclear attack on our country. We watched science fiction movies that portrayed giant bugs and creatures mutilated and transformed by nuclear fallout and read a satirical magazine with a hero named Alfred whose mantra was, “What, me worry?”

We lived in fairly ordinary little houses that were usually under twelve hundred square feet. We shared a single bathroom with our parents and siblings, requiring strict rules about using up all of the hot water. There was normally one phone for the entire household whose central location made it almost impossible to have a private conversation of any kind. One television was also the general rule and a parent determined when it might be turned on and what programs would be watched. Things like sodas and sweets were delicacies that we did not often see. If we had siblings of the same sex we learned how to share a bedroom and a tiny closet with them. Vacations were a luxury and those who actually flew somewhere on a plane were the exception rather than the rule.

Our teenage years were marked with the usual angst of overcoming the challenges of puberty but our worries about the future became increasingly more complex. There were people in our midst fighting for rights that should have been theirs from the beginning of this nation. We were becoming more and more embroiled in a war that we did not understand but which used our peers to do the fighting either willingly or unwillingly. We watched the violence that seemed to be growing all around us while hearings chants of “Never trust anyone over thirty.” The times seemed so tumultuous and the changes were coming too slowly to keep up with our impatience.

By our college years we witnessed friends being drafted into the military and sometimes being shipped to that war that grew like a virus. We attended the funerals of friends who had been cut down in the flower of their youth. Some of us began to feel that our elders had somehow lost touch with the new realities of the world. We scurried to rallies to hear a charismatic soul named Eugene McCarthy who pledged to end the insanity only to become dispirited when he did not make it to the presidential nomination of his party. We watched the “silent majority” of our elders elect Richard Nixon, a man who seemed clueless about our own fears.

Along the way we became members of the over thirty generation. We had families of our own that required our attention. We set to work building our lives and in what seemed like a blink we were middle aged and our own children were coming of age as Generation X, a group seemingly without a cause that was in reality more like us than anyone ever realized.

Now we are the seniors of society, sometimes caught between the generation of the healthiest of our parents and our middle aged children. Our grandchildren, the millennials, are experiencing the same sorts of fears and disillusionments that once ruled our own thinking. They are as anxious for solutions as we once were. We have had the time to understand that we were no more unique than they are. We have finally found the wisdom to view those old photos of our parents, the so called “greatest generation” and see that like us they were once filled with visions of a grander world. That spirit is in our human DNA. It is something that we might trace back to the beginnings of time. Those seasons mentioned in the Bible are real, just as the circle of life is infinite. 

We push and we pull and we judge one generation after the next when the truth is that each group attempts to do its best. We make mistakes and manage victories. The world spins on its axis and revolves relentlessly around the sun. As nature does its thing we humans do ours until it becomes time for the next generation to try its own ideas. We grapple with our elders and lecture our youth during a lifetime, so often forgetting the simplicity of the best plan of all, to love, listen, laugh and respect one another. The beat goes on.