Any additional comments you would like to make?
Responses:
- “The questions helped me reflect on the last year. While it can be easy to focus on the negative, it is also good to look for where God is at work, and he certainly is.”
- “Good to think about how blessed we are.”
- “It would be wonderful to see the church active and spirit-filled with services in full swing.”
- “It will be nice to worship in church again and see our church family.”
- “We look forward to future Boomers’ Gatherings.”
- “Thanks for taking on this task – looking forward to the collated data.”
- “The questionnaire caused us to reflect personally and I think it will yield some nice information that can be shared with fellow Boomers.”
- “Thanks for checking in on us Boomers.”
- “It’s nice to know somebody is interested in how we manage to get through this.”
- “It will just be great to be able to go about life in a normal way without having to worry about masks and physical distancing.”
- “So, my life was circumscribed to small spaces, small social circles and limited activities. Did I choose what is really important? Will I continue to do so? Will I go back to feeling that most minutes of the day must be productive? Have I been pushed far enough in the last year to seek what is truly important? Am I convinced that I have really internalized this life lesson? Time will tell.”
- “We can’t wait to get vaccination #2 and then enjoy life without a mask and hopefully put COVID behind us. Pray that those who don’t want to get the vaccination will have a change of heart for the good of all. God is in control of all.”
- “A time like this COVID period makes you more aware of the convictions and possible conflicts people have for their own reasons about issues of health, protection, freedom, vaccination, etc.”
- “I’m concerned that we can be quick to lose our normal life and slow to see it return. I’m concerned with the amount of censorship that is going on in the medical and scientific community. I’m concerned that we take a more balanced approach to overall health when responding to challenges like a new virus. We should not just throw out our emergency planning for pandemic playbook and adapt a new extremely one-sided approach.”
Rob and Janey make some final comments:
- We, survey creators, consider ourselves optimistic realists. We are fully aware of the losses we as individuals, society, our community, country and the world have and are dealing with.
- It is not lost on us that we, as Boomers, are extremely privileged.
- We live in a beautiful, developed, democratic country.
- As a child, born in Canada, I do recall being called a D.P. (ironically, by children of an immigrant family from a country other than the Netherlands). I also remember racial epithets yelled at me from a passing car; during a summer when my skin turned very dark due to a summer job picking strawberries. Other than that, I have not experienced racial prejudice because of the colour of our skin or my ethnic background. As my father once said while we were discussing racism around the family dinner table when I was young, “as immigrants we were lucky: because of our light skin colour we blended in.”
- As members of the Boomer cohort most of us are retired, with pensions. Most of us have time and/or money to help others, whether it be family or the community at large.
- We don’t have to deal with working at home while supervising children doing on-line schooling.
- We don’t have to go out to work in risky situations, a situation our adult children and teenage grandsons are dealing with.
- Though we may officially be referred to as seniors, few (if any) of us require assistance in our lives. That is the position our parents are in, and they have lived under severe restrictions for over a year now…for good reason. Nevertheless, their situation has been socially stifling and detrimental physically as well.
- We choose not to dwell on the losses; but to do what we can for our family and the community we live in. If we could effect change, we would want to be part of that; however, that is not a position we find ourselves in, so we will work in our small corner rather than dwell on the negative.
- We believe maintaining a balanced outlook is the healthy choice.
- We, too, look forward to Gathering the Boomers together again. The time will come.
For your listening pleasure:
You’ll Never Walk Alone Rodgers and Hammerstein for Carousel