I’ve heard it since I was a child: “The kids these days, they have no respect.” And it’s nothing new. Even the author of Ecclesiastes hinted at this mentality:
“I hated all my work that I labored at under the sun because I must leave it to the man who comes after me. And who knows whether he will be a wise man or a fool? Yet he will take over all my work that I labored at skillfully under the sun. This too is futile.”
Ecclesiastes 2:18-19, HCSB
“Skillfully” there is proof of the prior generation’s opinion that their products are better than ours, and the new generations only work halfheartedly. The Hebrew literally says “labored and labored,” which is an ancient writing technique to emphasize the verb. It could also be translated, “labored at laboriously.” The Septuagint translation hints at the HCSB’s “skillful” translation, when it translates the second “labor” with the verb for “to make wise.”
But I don’t bring this up in order to exposit Ecclesiastes 2. I use it rather as a jumping off point to discuss this quote:
“We do not inherit the earth from our ancestors, we borrow it from our children.”
There is some question about where this quote originated. I saw it in the hall at the middle school I work at, attributed to a “Native Proverb.” However, when I googled it, answers were split between Wendell Berry’s 1971 book, The Unforeseen Wilderness,1 or Chief Seattle (c. 1780-1866).
Regardless of where it originated, the quote stopped me in my tracks. The fact that we have had it backward for thousands of years should make us shudder. What happened to make parents hate their kids so much?
I look at my kids and lament the world in which they are growing up. But I know it’s not their fault. It’s not even my generation’s fault. But it easily could be one day. By and large, millennials have struggled to land on their feet as adults. So we could easily mope and complain about our lot. We could follow in previous generation’s footsteps and continue the cycle.
Or we can break the cycle. The track record of millennials has been to break traditions. This would be a great one to break. In fact, I would argue it is critically necessary to break this one.
We were raised (at least the evangelicals among us) to be escapists. Our doctrine of the end times was good Christians being plucked off the earth and kept safe from danger and persecution as God “destroyed” the earth.
But this trained us to think, “It doesn’t matter what I do to the earth, God’s going to burn it up someday anyways. We’re supposed to master it.” This thinking peppered my mind as a high schooler actively littering.
But it’s not true.
We are supposed to take care of the earth. We’re supposed to care for flora and fauna and not flippantly leave it FUBAR. The end times theology I was raised in told me we needn’t worry about nuclear war, because Jesus would return before that happened. But that’s not true. There is nothing in Scripture to leave us with that idea. And if history has shown us anything, people are capable of horrible shit. Plunging the earth into nuclear winter and killing off 90% of the earth’s population is not an impossible reality.
I pray against this daily.
But while we still have breath, we must resist. We must admit that things might never get better for us, but if we pursue anything in our lives, we will strive to leave our children in better shape than we were left at 18.
In this with you!
Thanks for reading.
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DonateNotes and References
- Page 23: “I am speaking of the lives of people who have undertaken to cherish the world and do it no damage, not because they are duty-bound, but because they love the world and love their children; whose work serves the earth they live on and from and with, and is therefore pleasurable and meaningful and unending; whose rewards are not deferred until ‘retirement,’ but arrive daily and seasonally out of the details of the life of their place; whose goal is the continuance of the life of the world, which for a while animates and contains them, and which they know they can never encompass with their understanding or desire.”
This quote comes from the “revised and expanded” 1991 edition [San Francisco, CA: North Point Press]; the original is on page 26 and closer to the quote I saw at work. ↩︎
