Giving Beyond Our Own Time: You Can Make It Happen

AS WE BABY BOOMERS prepare to, how shall we say, "take our leave of this planet and move on", what is the state of the world we shall soon enough leave, how will we have left it? I remember my friend giving the commencement speech forty years ago at my hgh school graduation, and he said five words, over and over again..."you can make it happen"..

..he said this five times in a row, each time with the emphasis on a differnet one of the five words, creating a different meaning each time, emphasizing a different aspect of the whole idea. Go ahead and dtry it at home, nobody witll get hurt, and someboy  might get motivated. Those five words motivated me forty years ago, in five different but related ways. And they stilll do today.Obviously "we can make it happen" would work just as well but, on May 24, 1973, the word my friends used was "you"..

Now the question is:  did we do it? did we make it happen? Obviously the answer must be yes, in certain ways. IN other ways, the answer thus far, it must be admitted, is "no"....but, in the words of the great philosopher yogi berra, "ia aint over til its over". In other words, we, we baby boomers aint done yet...not quite.....

But the clock is a tkciin', so, we'd best get a move on, and finish up. AS we baby boomers near retirement, one thing we need to do for sure is not focuse so much on how much wealth we can collect for ourselves, but rather, how can we contribute to building a future world is which everybody has enough wealth... and I mean basic wealth; food, clothing, and shelter. (It don't get no more basic than that).

Retiring in comfort is all well and good, but, rather than retiring as lavishly as possible, we baby boomers should decide what level of ecomic success do we need, what level is reasonable, tehn, once we have achieve a resaonable level of retirement wealth for ourselves, start working to help other people, and the world as a whole. Doesn't that make more sense than spending every last remaining of our lives building greater wealth for ourselves, only to die with a fortune?

What's the point of that? Why not share whatever we produce beyond our own reasonable needs, as a way of helping generations beyond our own baby booming lives? Bill Gates and Warren Buffett are leading the way in this.Their trust fund will keep giving far beyond their own life spans, and to one extent or other, we can all follow their honorable and noble examples.

Maybe one less european vacation, one less car to play with, maybe a few hundred square feet less living space for ourselves....and one more donation to our trust fund for future generations. We all can givce something, we hard working successful baby bommers, as we near  retirement, and, ultimately, heaven.  We can make it happen. YOU can make it happen...