Do We Understand Each Other? What Future Are We Leaving to Our Children?

Dr. Rudolf Lothar Hänsel

Discussions following my articles have made it clear to me that many contemporaries do not understand what I want to express. I would like to make it clear that one does not have to agree with me at all (thoughts are free); however, it is my concern that one understands what I want to say – even if one disagrees or wants to disagree.

My most pressing problem is the question of why, after a mostly fulfilled life, we adults will leave our youth with what we fear will be a terrible future?

When I see the fresh, lively and sometimes happy faces of boys and girls on the street, on the bus or on TV, it chokes my heart to think of what is in store for them. Why don’t we older people and we intellectuals – who have been enabled for years by the working population to inform and educate themselves comprehensively – have more courage and empathy to leave a future worth living for the children of this world?

Why do we think only the others are responsible for the present misery?

Only if one takes the view that all others – the rulers, politicians, etc. – are responsible for the earthly misery, then I myself am “off the hook”, can “wash my hands of it” and do not have to do anything to avert the worst and to steer the world on a different course. That is then exclusively the damned “duty and obligation” of these evildoers.

But if we see it this way, that we adults have our share in world events and are partly to blame for the fact that we live in a world where war, crime and injustice are the order of the day because the world is the way we have set it up or – in relation to already existing conditions – tolerated it, then perhaps we would do something to change that. No one can escape responsibility. We are always complicit, even when we are victims.

Do we understand each other?

Psalm 78

Psa 78:1 A Maskil of Asaph. Give ear, O my people, to my teaching; incline your ears to the words of my mouth!

Psa 78:2 I will open my mouth in a parable; I will utter dark sayings from of old,

Psa 78:3 things that we have heard and known, that our fathers have told us.

Psa 78:4 We will not hide them from their children, but tell to the coming generation the glorious deeds of the LORD, and his might, and the wonders that he has done.

Psa 78:5 He established a testimony in Jacob and appointed a law in Israel, which he commanded our fathers to teach to their children,

Psa 78:6 that the next generation might know them, the children yet unborn, and arise and tell them to their children,

Psa 78:7 so that they should set their hope in God and not forget the works of God, but keep his commandments;

Psa 78:8 and that they should not be like their fathers, a stubborn and rebellious generation, a generation whose heart was not steadfast, whose spirit was not faithful to God.