It’s perfectly natural for each generation to examine what their parents did, evaluate it, and decide what they want to do differently. That’s how civilization advances. That’s how human progress gets made.

At the same time, we must make room for grace and appreciation of those who came before us. In many ways, the balance between honoring and honestly assessing has gotten a bit skewed in the modern era. Billy Garton, Jr., host of the You Choose podcast, encapsulated it perfectly in a poem he shared called “The Age of Ancestral Amnesia.”

“We are living in a time where it has become fashionable to blame our parents, to dissect them, diagnose them, to explain ourselves through their failures,” he begins.

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‘The comfort of vocabulary they never had access to’

Then he explains the dilemma: “We’ve learned how to critique our elders without learning how to honor them. We speak fluently about trauma, but rarely about sacrifice. We analyze their emotional limitations from the comfort of vocabulary they never had access to.”

He shares that many fathers were taught to “endure” instead of “feel.” Mothers were taught to “survive,” not to........

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