The other day I was sorting through some of my mother's papers and found her passport from the late 1940s. It was a Canadian, not an American, passport, as my mother was from Quebec. She was just in her twenties at the time. The photograph was a shock, she looked so young. And she looked that way, because she was young at the time.
Her funeral, as those who stop in here know, was in April. Last week, I went to the funeral of an uncle by marriage.
I've knew him for my entire life, but I didn't really know his life story. One of his sons gave that story beautifully in the eulogy.
What do these things have to do with each other?
Well, quite a lot.
In my last entry here I frankly slammed the Boomer generation. I rewrote it several times and it still came out that way. I fully agree, it should be noted, that a generation may define an era, but it doesn't define any one individual within it, so that was unfair, to be sure, on an individual level. And this one will be, accordingly, undeserving praise for many as well. And going further, I'll also note that I've never liked that tag, The Greatest Generation, applied by the Boomer generation to their parents as they discovered years later what a praiseworthy generation the generation they tortured really was. As most corrections of that type, that tag went too far. "Greatest" is quite a claim. Greater than the generation that fought the Revolution, or the Civil War? Well, I'm not willing to go that far.
Indeed, I'm willing to state that many of the things that make the "Greatest Generation" great are attributes that they shared with prior generations. Somehow that was lost. And it isn't that they fought World War Two and endured the Great Depression, but rather the way they endured those things and had it not impact their personalities, which is something that would have been true, and was true, of earlier generations as well. In this era, when it seems society can't even tell that there are two generations in our species, and every human attribute is regarded as some sort of debilitating disease, I don't think that's true.
Because the following is what struck me.
Perhaps the single most interesting feature of that generation, which they share with earlier generations, is the extent to which they entered adult life earlier than other generations, accepted that, and moved through adversity without loosing their morals, character and faith.
Take, for example, the uncle I mention above. I didn't know his life story well, but it turns out that he was a first generation American. His parents were from Croatia. He grew up in poverty, but in a household that was deeply Catholic. He served as a combat NCO in World War Two, and was able to go to college because of the GI Bill. He did that, moved to town from Cheyenne, and married and raised a family here. He went blind in middle age. Throughout all of this, he never lost his morals, his personality, or his faith.
Or take the example of my mother. She was pulled out of school, due to the Great Depression, as a teenager in order to work. She did that for several years before moving, still very young, to western Canada and then down to the United States. Now, a teenager in her mid teens working in this fashion, out of school, would be abnormal and we'd fear for the girls future. But here again, from a strong Catholic family, she never lost her way.
And these examples from this generation and the prior ones aren't unusual. Fred Goodstein, now long gone but well remembered even though he was gone, when I first started practicing law, left school to work in his teens, finding industrial employment in Denver. Moving to Casper and establishing an oil field supply business here in town that ultimately made him a wealthy man, he was the definition of businessman when I was young. He was also legendary for his generosity and kindness. So, the Jewish boy who left school early to work never lost his way, and became wealthy in the process.
From a generation prior, my father's faher provides another example. He left home at age 13 to work, moving across the country to do it. But here too, a 13 year old on his own did not become a lost soul, but remained loyal to his faith and upbringing his entire life.
That's the difference, I think, between current generations and the ones that seems to have closed out at the end of World War Two. They had many fewer advantages. They were much less educated. They often started working very young. But something about how they were raised caused, in large numbers, for the same individuals to have very solid characters by the time they were mid teenagers. If we are sometimes shocked by how young some married, or how young some were on their own, we should perhaps recall that they were much more adult by their mid teens than many people are today in their thirties of forties. Most of them didn't fall into vice. They weren't confused about who they were or what they were. Their faiths were rocked by tremendous adversity.
We might well ask what it was that made them that way, and how we lost it. Somehow we really did, and not just in the United States, but in the entire western world. Something occurred. In some fashion people lost their cultures in very detrimental ways which create for a longing and confusion that is at the epic level.
We cannot say that prior generations, or the generation that preceded the Boomer generation, got everything right. Certainly not. Indeed, to the extent that I've complained about the Boomers, we should recall that it was their parents that essentially created the world that Boomers redefined when they were young, by conferring every advantage upon them so that their children were not faced with the same levels of adversity that they were. And the idea makers of the late 50s and the 60s were, as a rule, the World War Two generation, at least at first, not the Boomers.
But still, there's something about them which really does set them, and earlier generations, fully apart from the later ones. They were tougher, and frankly, they were often better, than the ones that came later. And they were that, with a lot less. Indeed, in some ways the "lot less" may have influenced why they were better.
Anyhow, something certainly to think upon.
No comments:
Post a Comment