The world has a new favorite sport, and it's not soccer or one of the Olympic games. It's the ancient game of kicking the can down the road, and it's gaining popularity all over the globe.
We see it in economies that run up debts that the future will have to pay. And most tragically, we see it in the ongoing refusal to deal with massive social and environmental problems that are ticking away like a planetary time bomb.
The most heinous crime of the generation of adults currently running the world isn't the trashing of our collective life support systems and the economies on which they depend, but the immoral practice of repeatedly kicking the can down the road so that it will be future generations who have to clean up the messes and pay back the debts.
We see this "kicking the can" behavior in every area of modern life. We don't want to solve any problems NOW.
Let's not deal with the climate disruption and instability which is already causing ever-greater destruction in many locations around the world. Let's not face the environmental and financial debts that will take years and years to repay -- if they can be repaid at all. Let's not address the spending down or contamination of the legacy we inherited -- soil, seeds, food systems, fossil fuel resources, water systems, wild nature, our fellow animal species, the oceans -- and certainly let's not give much thought or money to its healing, regeneration or repair.
And certainly let's not adequately finance our children's education systems to give today's young people the knowledge they will need to have a fighting chance of fixing the messes we leave them.
And speaking of children, we certainly don't want to discuss the massive overpopulation that in one lifetime has grown way beyond the planet's support capacity, threatening our children and grandchildren with living through the kind of pandemics, massive die-offs and degradation of human life we haven't seen since the Black Death in the 14th century.
No, we certainly don't want to think about any of this. What a downer!
Instead, let's party on til the music stops, celebrating and emulating the 1 percent who can grab a huge percentage of the world's goods while they last.
And while all of this occurs, our leaders, would-be leaders and most of the adult citizens on our planet keep kicking the can down the road, hoping that all of the problems we've created won't really hit the fan while we're alive or will magically be solved by some new technology before we have to endure any consequences of our actions -- or inaction.
Is this any way to run a planet?
But what the heck. Let the kids look out for themselves.