My Little Town: Still-life, circa 1970

Image courtesy of "Old Santa Fe"an, Tomas Mas...

My Home Town: Santa Fe, circa 1955.

The view is westward, down San Francisco Street. The story goes (not in this film) that the man who killed Trotsky, Ramon Mercader, prepared for the deed in a room he rented above the pharmacy, visible in the foreground.
http://www.ibtimes.com/forgotten-assassin-ramon-mercader-man-who-murdered-leon-trotsky-1091298

My Neck o'the Woods, circa 1940...

My Grand-parents' Santa Fe and environs...

M-M-My G-G-Generation

"We" as in the "Boomers?"  "We trampled...tanked and trashed," it all, you mean?

Woody sez: Fuck you!~

Boomers--born 1945-61--were the ones lucky enough to have been "born at the right time." And it's true: Nobody else--no other cohort in history--has had access to all the material advantages, opportunities, technological devices, scientific advances, economic developments, etc., in which we were whelped, weaned and grew to adulthood.

But it's not like "we" wasted "our" opportunities. And if we squandered resources, it was because, at least in part, because no one knew ANY BETTER...

It was sheer luck to have been born then. I claim no inherent value nor virtue from it. But neither to I accept "blame" for  my good fortune. I think I have contributed in proportion to my bounty.

The system into which we were born was there before us, and it will survive us, if possibly only for a handful of decades. Both "Second Nature" AND "First nature" were more fragile than they looked. But if yer lookin' to heap PERSONAL responsibility on me for the accident of my birth: BITE ME!

Re, Boomer's' contributions: Apart from the trans-generational struggle of the black community for civil rights, Boomers--the student/counter-culture movement of the 60s and 70s-- were the ONLY cohort in the last 70 years to mount a coherent, albeit somewhat disjointed, national, cultural movement FOR peace, justice, and equality.

So, yeah. BITE ME!