Culture and Commitment

Although Mead gives no definite answer as to how to control the future or save the earth for the matter, she does gives us ideas, thoughts, and options on how to do so.

As Mead reflects back on the 60’s, now looking back from the seventies, and sees the new generation now becoming older she asks a question. This was beneficial not only to the elder, who would know what lie ahead for their child, but for the child as well. One which could never be bridged or narrowed, but simply spoken across when both sides attempted to listen and truly hear what the other was trying to say. The child would be able to turn to the elder for answers and advice because they would be wise to what the child needed, and was going through. In doing so we will not turn into a “prefigurative culture”, as Mead would say where the only certainty about the future is its uncertainty. She states that giving one member the knowledge that they are part of a whole that could collapse without them, gives them the power to contribute to keeping us all moving in a positive direction and control our futures. This is labeled as a “cofigurative culture”. his would be the first in many new inventions and developments to separate these two sides, but not the last. There had been many gaps before it, but none like it. This is because they have something shared amongst one another, and they feel as if they can be helped more by their peers, rather then the elders who are mearly on the outside looking in never having experienced what they have. In this new generation and their ideas lay the hope for the future. The generation gaps of old were small discrepancies between the young and their elders.

When the generation gap was finally realized in the 1960’s to be more of a “ditch” then a gap, it was also realized as one of uniqueness and loneliness.