I didn’t want to turn 60 last week – and turned mournfully to my trusted source of advice and empathy.
That would be my Mum.
She listened carefully and simply asked: ‘well, how do you think I feel?’ Ouch – she had, in a stroke, made me feel better about my looming birthday, but also reminded me that I needed to get over myself.
So, I quickly moved on and asked Mum her thoughts on some issues – the failure of the Voice referendum, the horrifying reports of war and political scandal.
The fragility of democracy, the death of civil discourse, the future of peace and what sort of collective lunacy seems to have suddenly taken hold around the world?
My Mum has been indulging these massive questions my whole life – she is so awesome.
I know I am far from alone as children much younger than me are asking their own parents different incarnations of the same questions.
Both my sons have asked me – even though we have different views about Israel we have been able to talk like the adults we are.
What I appreciate is their anxiety (it is good to care) and that they want to include my thoughts in the gigantic jigsaw puzzle of information pouring in.
And although I am 60 I also need to find out what Mum thinks.
I have been asking from a very young age – too many questions really.
One of my sisters confided how much I bored her and the others at the dinner table with the ‘dreaded Catherine questions’. I was probably ten when they started and my siblings are younger so, eek – I get it was no fun for them.
But these days I often have Mum all to myself and her opinion is always so intelligent and thoughtful – but she belongs to a quiet generation where it is never proffered – you have to ask.
Mum left school after the Year 9 Leaving Certificate to become a nurse, but is the best read person I know. Her views are never harsh or ideological but always compassionate and often accompanied by a literary quote or a line of verse.
I am pretty sure all of us, of all ages, are having these conversations – but with so much anger and contested facts, we tend to keep them private and with people we trust.
Having just turned 60 it is suddenly so clear how much my life experiences have shaped my views. My Mum has said the same – she grew up during World War II and has a completely different life experience – and truly, however bad we think things are we must show respect for what they endured.
I fall in between the ‘silent generation’ and the youth of today. In my teenage years I recall prime minister Bob Hawke, as the first Australian prime minister to ever visit Japan, being denounced as a traitor by the RSL (which was at the time populated by veterans and former POWs from the Pacific War).
Today prime ministers get criticised if they don’t visit Japan, so you see how this shapes the different beliefs and attitudes of different generations. It is completely legitimate for experiences to generate different views – we all need to respect that.
Our generation’s experiences matter because we have lived longer and have some informed wisdom.
But young people’s views deserve to be respected equally because they are based on the here and now, not weighed down by the baggage of history.
They have way more invested than us because they, and their children, are going to live with the consequences far longer than us.
I feel like I am stating the obvious but there is such a disconnect emerging between our generations and I perceive an impatience and inability by my generation to listen to them properly and know our place in the scheme of discourse.
My generation grew up with the threat of MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction – the Cold War situation where any war between the USA and USSR was basically the end of life on our planet).
We were the subject of the first ever Australian Youth Survey conducted by ANOP (Australian National Information Polls) in the 1980s that found over 90 per cent of us believed we would not live our natural lives due to the inevitability of nuclear war. I personally recall being angry (unfairly so) with older generations for somehow putting us in this situation.
During this period a wall divided Germany and people died trying to cross it. For us the Vietnam War divided a nation. In the UK the IRA (Irish Republican Army) blew up Lord Mountbatten, tried to kill the British Cabinet, the Queen’s Annual Parade was targeted and images of dead horses were all over the front pages of the newspapers.
The entire Israeli Olympic Team was taken hostage at the Munich Olympics. Flights were hijacked almost routinely.
There was Idi Amin’s murderous rule in Uganda. The revolution in Iran and failed attempt to rescue US Embassy hostages. World leaders assassinated – even Ronald Reagan was shot. And then the unforgettable day John Lennon was murdered – a day almost everyone of my vintage will recall.
It seemed a vast conspiracy of evil was gripping the world and killing everything that was good.
I loop back to those years to demonstrate that the events of recent weeks and months are far from unprecedented in world history.
But they are unprecedented for young people like my sons who have been able to roam the planet almost at will and whose greatest challenge was having the brakes slammed on by the pandemic.
I cannot say for sure if the freedom and prosperity we Australians have experienced since the Berlin Wall fell and Nelson Mandela was set free are ‘normal’ times – the reality is the world has struggled with nationalism, brutality and ideology for millennia.
For young people who have only known this relative stability the events of recent months have shaken them profoundly.
I feel we all need to stay composed and absorb the horror we have become so unused too – and understand even though we may be grieving for different reasons – we are all grieving.
There is an enormous sense of loss when confrontation disintegrates to war and for ordinary people the true horror unfolds.
I personally feel a need to bond around the better angles of humanity which
do not demand we all think the same thoughts.
Rather that we can respect and grow by listening to different perspectives. We all have to get over ourselves and listen to each other. If I have one take-out lesson from life, that has to be it.
For four decades The Echo has printed the stories some people loved, some people hated, and some pretended not to read. If you want us to keep telling the truth, the real truth, not the sugar-coated version. We’ll need your support to keep the presses rolling. 
