We do face many challenges in the world. We look at some of them before. Some of
the greatest challenges to social cohesion if you're a civic worker are
things like the wealth gap. In the UK today we have the widest wealth gap in the last 40
years. It's widening in fact. In the USA as well and I suspect Australia. 1 percent
of China's population inherits its wealth but in the UK it's still 25%. We have a
technology gap around the world. By 2015 five million households in sub-Sahara in
Africa will get their very first television set. Yes, 25% of the globe is
using the internet but for most of that 25%, broadband is impossible. So what
they're getting is not a very good service. There's a travel gap. Ninety percent
of the global population will never leave the land of its birth. That
compared with 28 million people in Europe that travel every day, that's a
significant gap in travel opportunities. But research that we have done and
others have shown that, or suggested that, the biggest area of challenge to
social cohesion over the next 10 or 15 years is not issues relating to any of
the above nor gender, race, or religion. The biggest cause of division in
community perhaps over the next ten years will be generational for reasons
I'll go into in a moment. There are of course five generations existent at this
time, but three that have real influence in the global conversation. How many baby
boomers are here and proud of it?
Alright, we are the make love not war, make babies not bombs, "imagine all the
people" that's us, generation. You know we were shaped by certain things in our youth.
We are a fairly idealistic generation, Generation X following us,
age today between late twenties and late forties. In Australia, quite different
taking the name today from the book by Douglas Cloak Copeland who
suggested that his generation, Generation X, did not really know where to fit it
into a system it had not invented, hence the name. The Millennials are different
again. They are today my children's age mid-twenties and under, down to about low
teens. After that we have
what some people call Generation Z and then we run out of letters and start
again. Each generation... oh that's cool... did you get all that? You gotta buy the DVD and play it slow, that's what you do.
Each generation is like an individual. It has a biography. It's not about when you're
born that shapes your generational thinking it's the experiences you share with a
cohort of people of your own age. That's what shapes what generation you
belong to. I said we boomers are fairly idealistic. It's been said that Steven
Spielberg's only ever made one movie, he's just made it many times because all of
Spielberg's movies are about the little guy
achieving something big, and that idea of heroism runs very strongly through
boomer culture. When Martin Luther King declared I have a dream he wasn't a
boomer, but it was we boomers who took up the dream. When JFK said ask not what
your country can do for you, it was we boomers who heard that and responded in
the Peace Corps and in other areas, because we are largely an idealistic
and in a way, quite individualistic generation, do your own thing is a
statement we coined for situation ethic. But we made it even more personal, more
individual than it was in its original form.
Sometimes we have problems with Generation X because they're not
idealistic in the same way. They're very pragmatic. If you're a boss and an employer
and a boomer, and you got Gen X's on your team you will know this already
because you will know that while you're telling them the great dream you have, a
great vision that where the company's gonna go, where the enterprise is gonna
move, they're looking at you with glazed expressions as if to say look, I don't really
wanna hear this. I don't need this. I want to know how we're going to make it
happen. I want to talk about the pragmatic reality. Let's cut the wrapping
the KFC and let's get down to the real grassroots. These people want grassroots
activism. That's what they're about. They're also a very communal generation. In
the nineties the number one TV program in the States was Friends. Remember that?
And half of the action happened in a coffee shop. Remember that. Why was it the number one show?
Because it was watched by more Gen X's than any other show. Why? Because that's
what they want: friendship. It's a generation that in many ways came along
at a time when boomers, their parents, were dealing with the self actualization
of the sixties and the greed is good in the eighties and in the process leaving
their kids behind. This was not a generation in many ways, I'm talking
generically, that was well parented or well nurtured, hence their desire, largely, to
find friendship, to find nurturing, in some way.