What's the meaning of Charlie Kirk? Sometimes the light's all shinin' on me. Other times I can barely see. Lately it occurs to me. What a long, strange trip it's been

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What's the meaning of Charlie Kirk? Sometimes the light's all shinin' on me. Other times I can barely see. Lately it occurs to me. What a long, strange trip it's been

Cliffnotes of the Zeitgeist 83d Edition. The law and refusal to depart, departing in the worst way, echoes of service.

The old lawyers.

I was on a phone hearing recently and one of the lawyers, whom I used to run into a fair amount but have not for years, sounded really rough.  In a subsequent phone call he sounded the same way, and I looked up his firm photo and realized he is now 76 years old.

76.

What the crap?

In his photo, he looked haggard and ancient.

I was at something else not too long ago and saw another lawyer I used to run into a fair amount, who always had a youthful appearance even though I knew he was at least  decade.  I was shocked by his appearance.  

He's now 83.  He might just be practicing part time, I'd note.

I spoke to a lawyer friend of mine who is now up over 70, I think.  He doesn't appear worn or drawn down, but he told me that he's afraid of retiring as he enjoys the social interaction of the lawyers.  We discussed another lawyer who is a friend of his whom I figure is now in his mid 70s.

 There's something deeply wrong with all of this.

This reflects, I'll note, in our society at large, of course.  Our last qualified President, Joe Biden was in his 80s, and clearly suffering from mental decline, when he left office in defeat.  A recent book regarding the 2024 election reports, in hte opinion of hte authors, that Biden believes he's smarkter than everyone else which formed the basis of his disaterous decision.  Our current chief executive is also, in my view, suffering from dementia at an increasing rate that can't be ignored, but which is largely being ignored, even as he destroys the economy, foreign relations, and American democracy.  He also seems to suffer from "only I can do it" delusion, and on at least one occasion in the 2024 campaign said as much.

Biden was a lawyer, eons ago.  Trump is a real estate developer, so that's a bit off point. But there's something really pathetic about lawyers who practice past their 60s.  I'm in my early 60s, I'd note.  They've lost something of their soul, if not their souls in general, and have nothing left but their work.*

There's also something societally wrong with a society that allows this to occur.  I'll avoid the political discussion, but mental decline is inevitable in almost everyone who lives past their 50s.  People don't want to believe it, but it's absolutely true.

And beyond that, society should not encourage the elderly to occupy positions such as this past their mid 60s.  It takes up space that should be filled by younger people.  By that point a peson should be ready to retire, and if they're not, they're never going to be ready, economically.  Talent wise, they should apply their talents and time to something else.

Read a book, train a dog, go fishing.  Discovery the person you were when you started out, and the one you apparently lost.

Mehr Mensch sein.

Service.

Vietnam service ribbon.

This will be an odd one, and it'll sound difficult not to make it should like I'm being unduly critical.

We've been running a lot of posts recently about the collapse of South Vietnam in 1975.  Nearly daily, as we're in the cycle in which things were becoming a disaster for the Republic of Vietnam, and a war which we entered in the early 1960s, and left in 1973, was about to be lost by the country we supported.

I note this as it's struck me for a long time how many professionals I know, including lawyers, who are of the Vietnam War generation and have no military service.

Not all, I'll note.  One former Federal District Court judge here was an artillery observer in Vietnam, and a lawyer in our capital city was an artilleryman.  Two state district court judges I know served in Vietnam.  And a few other lawyers I know did.

But by and large, most didn't.

It's interesting in a number of ways, one being that it's likely their father's all had served in World War Two.

Now, the Second World War was a huge war, to be sure.  But as a member of Generation Jones, when I was growing up, it was the case that if our fathers hadn't served in World War Two, they had in the Korean War, or on either side of it.  Growing up, this was so routine you simply assumed it.  I recall always being surprised if a kid I knew had a father who had never served in the Armed Forces, and this included professionals.  All the doctors and dentists that my father was friends with had served in World War Two or in the Armed Forces after that.  I didn't know but one lawyer then, but he'd served in the Post War Army and later on the older lawyers I knew who were of World War Two vintage had served, often quite heroically, in the war.

Baby Boom generation male lawyers?  Not so much.

I don't think that's a good thing, frankly.  War is awful but most American servicemen who served in the 60s nad early 70s didn't see a day of fighting.  The Service is full of men who aren't like you, who didn't grow up like you, and don't have any of your per service shared experiences.  That's valuable.

Lots of those guys would have been better men had they served.**  Donald Trump would have been.

And American society would be.  We really started dividing the country back into the haves, and have nots, but allowing so many who could afford an education to avoid serving.  It helped split hte country into the mess it is now.***

"Biased, Misguided WY Judges and Lawyers."

So claimed Wyoming's Congressional delegation about a letter signed by over 100 Wyoming lawyers.

I'm not a signatory to it as, frankly, I was too busy to notice its circulation when it was going around.  The letter is 100% correct, however.  I know a lot of the lawyers who did sign it, and more of a few of them are actual conservatives, and a few of them were once very significant figures in the Wyoming Republican Party, including those who were elected to office.  

Moreover, at least two of the three of the Congressional delegation itself are not anywhere near as populist as they now assert they are.  All three of these figures would have supported this letter under different circumstances, and two out of the three undoubtedly still hold the view that the lawyers are right, but are taking their positions as they do not wish to anger Trump supporters.  If the wind turns, they'll turn with it so rapidly that it will toss MAGA right off the decks.

All of which is profoundly sad.  That people hold one view and then express another one publicly is no doubt common, but it's not admirable, and is far from admirable in a situation like this.   It’s one of the things that’s really wrong with American politics today.

It is interesting t have even with the taking of extreme positions like this, at least one refused to publicly adopt the extreme Executive Power doctrine that’s being exercised now, while at the same time, not disavowing it.  John Barrasso, when asked if the President really had the power to levy tariffs the way he is (he doesn’t) just twice said that Congress had delegated a lot of power to the President.  It has.  It’s not a good thing, and he wouldn’t say that it is.

It does make sitting back and letting things happen easier.  The entire country is going to suffer massively due to Trump, and Wyoming is going to take a bruising.  It’d be far better to stand up and say so now, and take the lumps if they come, then to excuse your conduct later.

Footnotes

*Coincidentally, I saw this in our local newspaper in an advice column.

Dear Eric: I was an attorney when I started having memory problems at age 65. I retired and subsequently learned that I had a devastating rare dementia with a very short lifespan. Instead of providing me support, my friends disappeared from my life, at the time I needed them most. Friends may rally around you when you have cancer, driving you to chemo treatments, dropping off food and other things to support you; when you have dementia, everyone just disappears.

I’ve always been a sociable person and I’m missing that so much, but I have no idea how or where to start. Any ideas?

Students navigate campus atmosphere, social changes to find connection

– Left By Friends

Dear Friends: People sometimes don’t know what to do or say when confronted with illness, but that’s no excuse for your friends’ behavior and I’m sorry. The Alzheimer’s Association (alz.org) has a wealth of resources for people with dementia, including support groups, both online and in-person. Being able to talk with others about what you’re experiencing and feeling will help with isolation.

This also might be a time for you to explore new volunteer opportunities or social groups that have nothing to do with dementia, depending on your care plan and abilities. You are a person who is worthy of connection, with a wealth of experiences and knowledge from which others can benefit. Your company would be welcomed at a senior center, a local outing group or an organization that aligns with your interests and values. If you have anxiety about navigating these spaces with dementia, or need accommodation in order to feel safe, please don’t hesitate to reach out in advance and talk to a group leader about how you can participate most comfortably.

Eric is surprised that his fellow lawyers quit associating with him.

He likely ought not to be.

I don't think it's that people don't know what to say or do.  I think that people fail to appreciate that workplace social contacts are, to a very high degree, extremely casual or even business contacts, and that once the professional is not employed, at least in teh law, the value of that person to others in the law is gone.

In other words, this doesn't surprise me a bit. 

**I'd note that I feel the same way about men who weren't in the service, but who worked a blue collar or agricultural job.  Those employments are levelling in a way, and I've noticed that men of the same generation who were never in the Armed Forces, but worked as roughnecks or came from ranches and farms, are much more accepting generally of other people.

***And, ironically, it also started the country off on the hyper glorification of those who have been in the service.

Last edition:

Cliffnotes of the Zeitgeist 82nd Edition. The This Is Your Economy On Dementia Edition.

Labels: 2024 Election, Donald Trump, Education, Greenland, J. D. Vance, Mental Health, Military, Sanewashing, The roles of men and women, The Second Trump Administration, U.S. Space Force, Weird, Wyoming, Zeitgeist

Sunday Morning Scene, part Pars Duo: Please, stop.

Next year with be a Jubilee Year in the Catholic Church. For some reason, the Church felt it needed a mascot for this.

This is what it came up with:

How does a 2,000 year old institution in possession of much of the Western World's great art, come up with something so juvenile, and indeed something that looks like its out of Pokemon?

In announcing this, Archbishop Rino Fisichella stated that the cartoon imagine, titled "Luce" (light in Italian) was inspired by the Church's "to live even within the pop culture so beloved by our youth."  This presents the classic problem of the elderly, now the Baby Boomers, recalling the desires of "youth" in terms of when they were fairly youthful themselves.  Indeed, in my mind it brings to mind attending the "Teen Life Mass", or whatever it was called, that used to be held on Sunday evenings.  I generally tried to avoid it, but when I did, you'd find a guitar band with bongos for the music, lead by a Boomer, and a bunch of aged Boomers who would sway and whatnot to the music.  

In contrast, if you hit some Masses with a lot of young people, you'd find young women, some down in their teens, wearing mantillas.

I'm pretty convinced that in 2024, with ready access to the Internet, and all the news that's on it, combined with all the sewage that's washed up with it, such as horrific political arguments, the revival of racism, far right and far left extremist, Hamas murder and rape of young people in Israel, an aged geezer in the Kremlin trying to revive the Soviet Union, and young women prostituting themselves on TikTok, a childish cartoon from the 1980s isn't really going to win hearts and minds.  Indeed, its even worse than the Comic Sans Serif font and 1970s vintage art that was officially used for the Synod on Synodality.  And it gives emotional support to the Orthodox who are looking for reasons not to come back into the Church, even if superficially. This sure doesn't look like something Saints Cyril and Methodius would have passed out.

I've long held, and have stated it here, that Western culture had experienced Post World War Two materialism and found it lacking, and that the generations that have come up in the wake of the Baby Boomers are struggling to through the cultural innovations of the 1960s and 1970s off.  We don't believe that "Greed is good" or that the Sexual Revolution was freeing. The problem is that so much was destroyed that recovering is hard, particularly when the aged hand remains on the tiller.  Often that aged hand reaches out with what it thinks the young want, not grasping what that is, and actually making things worse.

This cartoon is really bad.  Somebody should look around the Vatican and see if something serious might be available.  The young Catholics in blue jeans, the mantilla girls, and myself, will all be thankful.

Postscript

I'm hating this image slightly less after some Twitter person made some interesting riffs off of it, but I still don't like it.

What the Young Want.* The Visual Testimony of the Trad Girls. The Authenticity Crisis, Part One.

Or maybe they're not.

At any one time, I have a bunch of posts in the works, some of which are on concurrent themes. This is one, basically, as it touches on a larger topic.

Something is going on.

A couple of years ago I started to see some women, by which I mean, let's say, women 40 years or older, resuming the wearing of chapel veils (mantillas).  They were clearly on the traditional end of things.

Recently, however, I'm seeing young women do this.

I shouldn't, probably, have used the term "girls" in the caption, but for whatever reason, culturally, we tend to use the term "girls" for young women well into their 20s.  Maybe somewhat beyond.  It seems to encompass women in their late teens on up to that point.

And that's what I'm referring to here.

I noticed it first the year before last, and at an early morning Mass on a Holy Day (All Saints Day, I think).  Two young women, probably very late teens or very early twenties, sat right in front of me.  One was dressed conservatively but contemporarily. She was wearing a leather skirt. . . and a chapel veil (mantilla).

Now, there was a young woman from a very trad family in the parish who dressed almost as if in a Medieval costume for young women every Mass. That's not what I'm talking about here.  This young woman was wearing a nice wool sweater, and a leather skirt, and a chapel veil.

It caught me off guard.

I'm seeing stuff like that all the time now.  Young women, often early twenties, dressed conservatively, but not in costume, who have adopted the mantilla.  Indeed, just yesterday, at the early morning Mass Sunday, the Church did the Ritual for the Elect for those who were coming into the Church.  They all have a sponsor.  One young woman coming in had, as her sponsor, another young women.  

Frankly, the sponsor was stunning.  And she was wearing a chapel veil.  Last Sunday across town there was another young woman dressed in that fashion who was eye catching as well, and the week before that there was another so dressed who was a head turner.**

I note that, as it was easy, when the only women who did this were let's say older, and otherwise dressed in a fashion that was old-fashioned, perhaps, or dour.  These young women aren't.   They're hard not to notice.

Indeed, yesterday, the young woman mentioned went from the front of the Church to the back with a very proud carriage, which is not to suggest sinful pride. Rather, she carried herself the way that people who are very self-assured, for very good reasons, do.

Something is going on.

And It's not just here.  A friend of mine in Oklahoma noticed the same thing at his local parish.  And it's crossed into other regions, or perhaps hit there first.  For example, notable Korean figure skater Yuna Kim is Catholic, and people like to snap photos of her at Mass wearing a chapel veil.

And it's interesting that this is going on at the same time that some members of the leadership of the Church, which tends to be up in years, seems to be trying to insert the liberal.  

I've often noticed that people who come up in particularly devise or stressed eras, and maybe more of us do than not, tend to form our view of the world in those times.  A lot of people in their upper 60s, 70s, and 80s assume that "what the young want" is what they wanted when they were young.  

The evidence for this is to the contrary.

There's a lot more to this.  It's interesting.

Footnotes

*It's important to note that categorizing what an entire generation, or generations, want is hazardous.  For example, at least superficially, here I'm noting a return to Catholic tradition among the same generation that is exhibiting such things as a belief that you can change your gender.

Well, a couple of things.

At any one time you can have an overall trend in a generation while individual members of it hold an opposite view.  There were, for example, more volunteers who served in Vietnam than there were conscripts, contrary to popular imagination, meaning that quite a few young men sought to serve in the war at the same time history informs us their generation had turned against it.  By the same token, you can find a few examples of Americans who were adamantly opposed to the country entering World War One or Two, and continued to hold that view after the country declared war.  Beatniks were a feature of the supposedly superconservative 1950s. 

Secondly, people are more complex than categorists and political parties may suppose, and as a result they can often hold contrary views, or views that seem to be contrary, or views contrary to the ones they themselves exhibit.  Indeed, I've heard some of the stoutest denouncements of tobacco from smokers.  They smoked, but wished they didn't. 

You get the point.

**For some reason, you're not supposed to say this. Well, noticing that a woman is attractive is not the same thing as engaging in Hefnereque behavior, and the fact that creeps have co-opted this entire aspect of communication is just evidence of how weird and pornified our culture is.

Gerontocracy. A Rant.

I recently posted this on our aviation blog:

The Aerodrome: When you are keeping the original barstormers flying.: 

When you are keeping the original barstormers flying.

I've posted about this elsewhere, when I was really miffed about it, but Wyoming's Cynthia Lummis has introduced a bill in the Senate to raise mandatory airline pilot retirement ages up to age 67.

Lummis is 68.

Let's note the trend here.  Lummis is 68.  Wyoming's John Barasso is 70.  Wyoming's Congressman Harriet Hageman, at age 60, could nearly be regarded as youthful.

Joe Biden is 80. Donald Trump is 77.  Chuck Schumer is 72.  Mitch McConnell is 81.

This is, quite frankly, absurd.

The United States is, without a doubt, a gerontocracy.

Okay, what's that have to do with airlines?

We repeatedly here there's a pilot shortage.  What is obviously necessary to, in regard to the shortage, is to recruit younger pilots into the field. That requires opportunity and a decent wage.

Vesting the good paying jobs in the elderly is not the way to achieve that.  Indeed, depressing the mandatory retirement age would be.

I suspect this bill will not pass, but the problem it notes is frankly severe.

Why is nothing getting done in this country?  And why are young people so disgruntled by work that old people complain about how disgruntled they are.

In large measure, this country and society is completely dominated by the elderly.

Now, this smacks of ageism, and it is. But there does come a time when one generation needs to back off and hand the reins to another.  The Baby Boomer generation is past that time, and it refused to yield.

It's absolutely insane that the two top contenders for the highest elected office in the nation is between two ancient men.  Seriously?  Can people whose world views were formed in the 60s really be expected to lead on any current crisis?  We've never expected such old people to rule in times of trouble before.

Franklin Roosevelt, who was regarded as old going into his fourth and fatally final term, was 63 years old when he died.

Woodrow Wilson, who lead the country through the Great War, was 67 when he died in 1924.  He outlived his great rival, Theodore Roosevelt, by several years.  TR died when he was 60, just as he'd always expected to.

Abraham Lincoln was 56 years old, serving in his second term, when he was assassinated.  I note that because in the greatest crisis in the country's history, we had a President in his 50s. . . not his 70s or 80s.

And its not just the Oval Office.  As noted above, the levers of Congress' machinery are held by the ancient, in many instances.  Wyoming just turned its Congressional seat over to a "freshman" who is now a freshman at age 60.

Lawyers at age 60, as she is, ought to be looking towards how things are going to be handled in the next decade as they inevitably face decline.  That doesn't mean taking up a leadereship role in teh country.

And people aren't really choosing these antiquarian figures. They have no choice.  It's much like this meme from the Simpson's that is so well know, it's traveled the globe:

And you do, as they have the money, even if they ironically don't have the members.

We repeatedly hear that Wyoming is the most "Red State" (meaning Communist, of course, oh wait ... not that means the most conservative as red is the color of socialism. . . oh wait, that's not right, blue is the international color of the far right so that means. . . oh never mind).  Even here, however, party registration breaks out in this fashion:

Sure, that means that "independents" are about 9% of the figure for Republicans, but we all know that at least a quarter of the GOP is made up of registrants who have gone there due to the Simpsonian monster.  If you want a voice, you have to vote in the GOP primary.  

And that means you have to accept that at the end of the day, the people you are voting in, with the odd exception of Chuck Gray, who is another topic, are going to be old.

And it's not just in politics.  Business is often, but not exclusively, dominated by the old.  In something, I personally follow, although not everyone does, the leadership of the Catholic Church, the Bishops, is elderly and heavily influenced by Priests who came of age in a liberal era, and therefore are in conflict with younger more conservative ones.

The law is dominated by the elderly as well.  Look at any Supreme Court, for the most part. Wyoming just took a failed run at raising the judicial retirement age up from the current age 70, which is pretty old.  It failed, but it had the backing of the Chief Justice of the state.  And this is the second time this has been tried in recent years.

For a variety of reason, for most of American history, people tended to step into their work in a major way in their 20s.  They were often very fully established by their 30s.  Doing that now is difficult in the extreme, thanks to people over 60.

People look back on certain generations that never had a voice. "Lost Generations".  Nearly everyone in the shadow of the Baby Boom Generation fits into that category to some extent, some more than others.

Be that as it may, we're not going to solve long term budget problems, energy problems, border problems, and the like, looking to people who look out and see the world through 1973 lenses.

Quiet Quitting and Lying Flat. Looking at the trend with a long generational lens.

From The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly.

The other day I got an email from some news source about "quiet quitting".  I only read the headline and the first paragraph, so I didn't inform myself on whatever it was about in any depth.

Then this headline hit the news sources:

Conan O'Brien's assistant who's 'quiet quit' her job for over a decade says it's okay to be 'mediocre' and find ways to do the 'minimal amount of work possible'

Now there's a blizzard of such stories, so many in fact that I saw a story about how many there are.  Another story, on NPR, put it this way:

Over the last several weeks, the concept of "quiet quitting" has exploded like a supernova across the media universe.

And they don't all apply to just the US.  Here's one about our supposed arch economic nemesis, the People's Republic of China:

Before ‘quiet quitting’ in the U.S., there was ‘lying flat’ in China. How the anti-work movement swept the world’s two largest economies

Apparently "quiet quitting" means two things.

To some people, it apparently means just doing as little as possible and not getting too invested in your job.

Conan O'Brien's longtime assistant just wrote a book on the topic, and claimed this status for herself, which is interesting.  In some ways, the book sort of recalls the 1967 film How To Succeed In Business Without Really Trying.¹

The other meaning is close, but not quite the same.  It means to do the amount you are paid for, and nothing else.  I.e. your own time, is your own time.  Again, the NPR article put it this way:

"You're still performing your duties, but you're no longer subscribing to the hustle culture mentality that work has to be your life. The reality is it's not — and your worth as a person is not defined by your labor."

Indeed, both of these trends have the latter as their common theme.

So what is going on here?

I probably ought to put my usual peremptory rejection of the Stauss-Howe Generational Theory in here, as once again I'm citing to it, but there's something generational going on here, I'm pretty sure.  Interestingly, it really shows where the theory is lacking, vindicating, I suppose, my skepticism about it.  This trend is generational, but it doesn't fit into the "this generation, then that" categorization the Stauss Howe theorist back.  About the only thing that rings true on this development is that changes tend to follow a crisis.

Crisis you say?

Well, I could hand you a veritable cornucopia of crises.  COVID-19 provided a huge one, and perhaps just now we're really getting to learn what its long term societal impacts are. As one Lying Flat Chinese individual noted:

But when the pandemic hit, life as he knew it came to an abrupt stop. Like many other workers Covid made him reassess his priorities in life.

Chatting with artist friends back in his home town it struck him how although they had little money they always had something interesting to say about their day and what they were up to - while all he had was work.

From the BBC. 

Anyhow, what that would mean that they should have these sets of characteristics.

What I've observed before here is this regarding the generations that follow the Boomer, and the Boomers themselves.  The Boomers were the most fortunate generation, as a generation (individual stories can and often do run counter to a generation's story).  They were born into a post-war world in which wealth was abundant like never before. Their parents sent large numbers of them to college at a time when you could still get a good job with just a high school diploma.  The US was the dominant economic power.² 

Like spoiled children often do, in their late teen early adult stages, they rebelled against their parents, and did so spectacularly.  But also, like privileged children, they came back into the fold pretty quickly as a rule.

Again, huge disclaimer, this might apply to you if you were listening to Richie Havens at Woodstock, but very well might not if you were listening for the VC in Vietnam.  Individual circumstances vary.³

As a generation, however, the same generation that didn't want to trust anyone over 30, hit their 30s, and went into careers of all sorts.  Pretty soon, the same generation that was lampooning their parent's generation for being interested in "plastics" was looking for all sorts of new uses for it.

As a huge generational cohort, and one that stepped over their parent's heads economically pretty quickly, they've been enormously reluctant to let go of the reins.⁴   The ultimately irony is the same generation that criticized their parents, a damaged generation that had grown up on the Second World War and the Great Depression, they ultimately espoused much of the same ideals in the workplace, even though they damaged much of their parent's generation's ideals in other areas (more on that in a separate post coming up).

So, what occurred, it seems to me, is that the generations that followed the Boomers more closely resembled some prior generations rather than have bold new features.  Generations Jones, growing up in the boomers wake but also enduring the tail end of a crisis, the 1970s inflation, came to have much the same view that the Depression Era or World War Two era generation did about work, although they differed on many other thins. Better find some and keep it.  They simply endured the Boomers as they had little choice, knowing that they were going to be seated at the children's table forever, must like teenagers in their mid-teens who find themselves seated with ten-year-olds at the Thanksgiving Table. No, you can't choose your own cut of turkey.  No, you can't have a glass of wine.  Yes, you are getting gravy whether you like it or not.

The Millennial's, and the generation behind them, seem to me to be a lot like the generation that fought World War One, that being the supposed Lost Generation.  No matter how they are defined by demographers and social scientists, those generations, when looked at, generally came into their own young, as prior generations had, and had little concept of employer loyalty.  Indeed, the same generation in the teens and twenties was often strongly pro labor and strongly anti "fat cat".  

I've noted these two instances before, but regarding this generation, back with the Pritzker Military Library still had its excellent podcast, it had a very good podcast regarding that generation. An author had interviewed a large number of very elderly American Great War veterans, and their interviews had some striking similarities.  One veteran recalled how he'd graduated from high school, taken a job at a local insurance brokerage right after that, fought in the war, came home, went back to work for it, married and lived out his entire life right there, ultimately owning the brokerage.  Collectively the men interviewed, many of whom were from farm families, had the view that life was hard, sudden death was common, the war came, it was hard, and sudden death was common, got out of the service, and life was hard, with sudden death being common.

World War One was one more thing.

So how does this relate to quiet quitting and laying flat?

More than you might suppose, I'd submit.

Generation Jones silently concluded, almost from the moment that they turned 18, that life was hard, and they were going to have to work in the shadow of the Boomers, with the Boomer set to use up as much of everything absentmindedly and remaking the world in the plastic image of the time, as The Graduate lampooned.  Their opinions didn't matter, and never would.  They pretty much resigned themselves to dying at their desks, and now that they're nearly 60, they're still resigned to it, with that resignation reinforced by their fellows, set to die at their desks, and often by their spouses, who grew up in the same era and are afraid of any thought that a person would do anything other than keep on keeping on, until the last row is plowed, and the tired mule dies in harness.

And to make it all the better, the Great Inflation, the horror of the economic times when they entered the workforce, has returned, robbing them at the begging of their entry into the work force, and cheating them at the period that should be the end.

Millennials, X and Y are different, however.  And maybe in this way, they're looking back.

Romanticizing the past is really dangerous.  Past times were typically much less ideal than we'd like to imagine.  But things in fact can be lost.

Much of what we see today in general family trends is merely a return to the past.  Adult children who are not married living at home is a return to the past.  Even married children living in a parent's home is a return to the past.  Not really feeling like moving all over the country, and focusing on work to support your life, rather than it being your life, well. . . that is in some ways too.

Footnotes

1. I'm not going to read it, in part because Conan O'Brien isn't funny. Also, however, writing a book is a pretty ambitious endeavor and I somewhat doubt that the author had quietly quit, but who knows.

2.  This isn't intended to be a bash on the Baby Boomers post, and indeed, most of the post on this site that seem to, aren't meant to be.  What this post documents is trends.

There are no perfect generations, I'd note, including the "Greatest Generation" that has come to be untouchable.  If this were a much longer post, it'd go into that in some detail as well, as much of what we're seeing right now stems from their experiences, with lives shattered from the Great Depression and World War Two, and being unable to really put them back together thereafter.

Right here, however, is a good place to note this.  The parents of the Boomers were different to start with, as they had been through a crisis that dated back to 1929 and their lives had no chance of being normal until 1945. The impact on the personality of the generation was inevitable.

3. See 2.  This can't be emphasized enough.

When I was a National Guardsmen in the 1980s my unit was full of Vietnam Veterans who hadn't gone to college and who had instead gone to war.  Their histories didn't match that of the generational archetype in a lot of ways.

4.  A bizarre example of this was given to the country the other day when the Biden White House had James Taylor perform at the signing of a bill.  Taylor performed Fire and Rain.

Seriously?

Fire and Rain was released in 1970.  

In terms of years passed, this would be equivalent to having had Al Jolson sing That Haunting Melody at the signing of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which was the top hit of 1912.  For that matter, Taylor's era was closer to Glen Miller's than to the current one.  There's no way having Taylor signing at a White House event makes it relevant to most current Americans given that most were born after 1970s.

Besides, Taylor is overrated and boring.

Missed Vocations?

This thread was originally started months ago, and then sort of abandoned.  I then found it again, and oddly enough, for some other reasons, I started typing out a thread that was sort of related to it.  Given that, I'm picking this one back up.  I quite frankly don't know if it's still on the same topic or not.

Anyhow, the other day I was speaking to a working class fellow who is connected to a lawsuit when the topic of his children came up.  They're in the same line of work that he is.  He told me, "I tried to get them to be doctors or lawyers but . . . "

He probably ought to be glad they didn't listen to him.

I listed to my father the one and only time that he gave me career advice, which I've noted here before, and that was a mistake.  I was planning, at the time, of becoming a game warden.  I was still in high school at the time, probably a junior, and mentioned it, and he noted that there were "a lot of unemployed people around here" with wildlife management degrees. There likely were.  Indeed, a family friend of ours was glad when his son gave up that pursuit to become an electrician for the same reason.  I never commented on it, but it saddened me.

I started off in geology, but when I graduated with that, there were no jobs in it. So, ironically, I ended up with the no job situation anyway.  I went to law school after that, as I'd never heard of an unemployed lawyer.

The other day, a friend of mine from my geology student days, who now works in another field as well, commented on how they can't find people to work. We've been noting the same thing.  He noted that "it's nice to have a job that you love, but most work is just work". 

Truer words were never spoken.  

Having said that, some work is worse than others.  One thing that's been noticeable recently in the law is that younger people are leaving the field of litigation.  Quite a few young law school graduates are just not going to work at all.

On the upper end, where I am, peering out from the edge of my late 50s into my early 60s, I'm at the point where retirement becomes a possibility, or maybe not.  Like Col. Nickerson in A Bride Over The River Kwai, you also begin to look back.  You also find, right about that time, that if you are a professional that you have no real frame of reference for retirement, and that everyone will conspire against it.

Indeed, most conversations that you will get into right about then start off with the "you're too young" or "what would you do?".  But beyond that, there are those who will express outright fear about your retiring, and they're mostly members of your own family.  Nobody encourages a person to postpone retirement more than a spouse, I think.  That's probably not true for people once they hit actual retirement age, say 65 or 67, but if the topic comes up earlier, you'll get the "that's a great idea, if you just get in . . . "  In other words, you need to keep working.

And for a person in my situation, with two kids still in college, that's probably true.  Something has really changed since I was that age in that conditions that existed when I was young are now pushed upwards in years.  

Or perhaps I just didn't notice them then.

Insurance is one such thing. We just switched insurance carriers as insurance for our two college age children is brutally high.  If I were retired right now, that would be the single biggest expense month to month I'd have right now.

So the old plow mule is turned around to plow another row.

"You missed your calling" is a phrase I used to hear adults utter when I was a kid, in reference to people who seemingly should have entered some occupation they didn't^[1]. .  The phrase was based on the concept of everyone having a "calling".

Given that it was so common, when I was young, I sort of assumed that everyone actually had a specific calling.  I.e., you might have a calling to the priesthood, or you might have one to be an auto mechanic.  I know that I'm not the only one who had this assumption, as one of my uncles mentioned having had the same concept when he was a kid.

That's not the way that Catholics generally understand it, however.   What Catholics actually believe is that people generally receive a calling to a vocation, in religions terms.  As one Catholic site puts it:

A person can have many different callings in life. For instance a person can have a calling to marriage, to fatherhood, and to a certain occupation. In the Catholic worldview everything we do should be ordered toward discerning and responding to the will of God, the ultimate good in an imperfect world. Ordering our lives toward God’s desire is the way in which we get to heaven. We do this in many ways. The following list is not exhaustive:

• Discerning our primary vocation (marriage, priesthood, religious life, etc.)
• Discerning our particular vocation (whom to marry, etc.)
• Following God’s will for our relationships
• Avoiding sin and seeking to examine our conscience to discern where we are falling short and where we are responding to grace
• Seeking to understand how God wants us to respond to circumstances in the world around us

That no doubt is not only partial, it may not even be fully accurate, but generally Catholics believe that you have a calling to a state of life, i.e., some sort of vocation.  Maybe you are specifically called to be a priest, monk, or nun.  Maybe you are called to the married life.  Maybe you aren't called to either, but to something else.

I bring (brought)^[2]  this up in the context of the news over the past couple of weeks about Native schools in Canada.

Eh?

Bear with me.

Probably most people who might stop in here have read a bit of this news, but I'll first note that reading a news story like this from a foreign country is inherently confusing, as you always feel like you aren't getting the full story, because you are not.  So, given that, those of us down in the US are only partially informed on this story.

From what you can pick up, and in fact a lot of this has been reported before and isn't new, news, this is the story.

Canada and the US both had, in the late 19th Century and early 20th Century, a policy of what we can more or less call forced assimilation. This was a government policy.  The general concept was that it was doing Natives a favor if you separated them from their children, and raised the children in the predominant European culture.

Now, this is obviously a gross condensation of the policy and the deeper you get into it, the less uniform it was.  

In the US, for much of this period, there was a policy of cooperation with religious denominations in this effort.  That varied enormously by location and practice.  It was, for example, pretty extensive on the Wind River Reservation, but not in the way noted above. Children weren't separated from their families, but rather Churches located as missions, with schools, on the Reservation.  At least one, the St. Stephen's school, still exists.  At these schools, children came during the day and went home when school was over.

The big U.S. school was the Carlyle school in Pennsylvania, but it wasn't run by a religion at all, but rather by the Federal government.  This appears to be the pattern that Canadian schools first had.

Canada, however, unlike the US, was heir to the English education system, which was much different.  The United Kingdom in historical terms only went to what we call public education pretty recently, starting with minimal public education requirements in 1880, and only requiring education up to age 14 in 1918.  People with money, in the UK, didn't go to public schools, they went to private schools, and given the social stratification of the time, that meant that the people who counted, so to speak, were those people.  In Ireland, which of course was part of the UK up until the result of the Anglo-Irish War, this meant that nearly all the education was provided by the Catholic Church, which wanted out of it when Ireland became independent but which the government didn't cooperate with, meaning Ireland still largely educates its young through the Church.  In Canada, education worked on a mixed English model, with Quebec being the major exception, as the education there was all private.  Indeed, up until the Quiet Revolution most Quebecois were still educated by the Catholic Church, which the Church also wanted out of in Quebec.  Indeed, often missed in the story of the Quiet Revolution was that it came about, in part, as the Church wanted out of education and running the hospitals.  Ireland would have done well to have learned the Canadian lesson at the same time, but still hasn't.

Anyhow, in the US there was a mixed Native American education model.  Some children were carted away from their families and educated in boarding schools, the most famous one of which was run by the United States government.  Some were run by religious institutions. Other children were educated locally, often by religious institutions, but on a model that's familiar to us today and which didn't involve separation from their families. Others simply weren't educated at all.  And as public education advanced in the United States in the 20th Century, Native American children came more and more into local school districts, some of which, like Wyoming's Fremont County School District No. 14, were almost all Native American by default.

So what's the point here?

Well, generally there's a lot of retrospective horror over this system that both the US and Canada had, and not without good reason.  It seems awful now.  At the time, however, it was generally accepted that Native populations should be subject to forced assimilation through education and that was a good thing.

That was never a good thing, but it was the universal view.  The added part of that, however, is that even if that was the European-North American view of things, neither of the two large North American countries were well-prepared to take the task on.

That probably ought to give us some pause about the educational direction we're forcing on young people today. Does it really suit what's going to make them happy?

I can't really use my own example in this context as it's too old to be relevant, but there was zero effort to provide students with any insight into this topic when I was that age.  Figure it out for yourself was the method that was used, which in my case was really figure it out for yourself.  My father, not without reason, was pretty silent on the topic.  My mother was ill, and her contribution was basically "you can go to any school you want to", with Notre Dame being mentioned as a possibility, probably as a cousin of mine who was a good student, and one year older than me, had gone there.

And that suited him really well.  He pursued a course of study that ultimately lead him to a career as a university professor in a neighboring state.

In my own case, the only suggestions on careers that ever came were from a grade school teacher, who suggested to my parents, or rather predicated, that I'd end up a teacher, the comment from my father as noted, some comments from my mother that "you're good at science", and then a comment from Casper College prof Jon Brady that I was suited for an analytical career as a lawyer.  Brady, interestingly, was a lawyer by training who spent his entire post Navy career as a history professor.  That same view, I'd note, is a view held by a lawyer friend of mine, who felt that the only other career I'd be suited for is that of priest, but then he's German and holds a German view of such things.

Anyhow, that's how I ended up where I am.

I've been thinking.Tomorrow it will be twenty-eight years to the day  that I've been in the service.

        

Twenty-eight years in peace and war, I don't suppose I've been at home more  than ten months in all that time.  Still, it's been a good life. I love India. I wouldn't have had it  any other way.   

But there are times... when suddenly you realize you're  nearer the end than the beginning. You wonder...you ask yourself...         what the sum total  of your life represents...what difference your being there  at any time made to anything... or if it made any difference  at all really.  Particularly in comparison  with other men's careers.    

I don't know whether that kind  of thinking is very healthy...but I must admit I've had some thoughts  along those lines...from time to time.

Col. Nicholson, The Bridge On The River Kwai.

I've been looking out at the legal field now, from a 30-year deep in view. . . .no, that's not true.  

I've been looking at litigation, from a 30-year prospective.

And that's not the same thing.

I've worked almost my entire career, well actually all of my entire career, in litigation.  I can't say that that view is an encouraging one, really.  Conditions have in fact gotten worse, it seems to me.  Lots of attention is paid to the sorry state of American politics but very little to the sorry state of the American justice system, i.e., the litigation system, as people are acclimated to it.

A Catholic saint who left his career as a lawyer to become a Priest remarked to one of his friends that he was leaving the practice, as "there were too many ways to lose your soul" as a lawyer.  I don't know about people who draft contracts, but it's certainly true of litigation.  And it's gotten worse over the years.

It's also something that younger lawyers now generally want no part of, as has become increasingly evident in the post pandemic onset world.  To really find that "glory of the American judicial system" type of belief, you have to be talking to lawyers who are now in their 50s.  Nobody else believes that, and younger lawyers want no part of it.  

That's become increasingly evident to me in recent months.  I look across the deposition table and the faces I see are only a little younger than mine . . . if not older.

Frost wrote on The Road Not Taken.

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,

And sorry I could not travel both

And be one traveler, long I stood

And looked down one as far as I could

To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,

And having perhaps the better claim,

Because it was grassy and wanted wear;

Though as for that the passing there

Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay

In leaves no step had trodden black.

Oh, I kept the first for another day!

Yet knowing how way leads on to way,

I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh

Somewhere ages and ages hence:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.

John Greeleaf Whittier, in Maud Muller, lamented what might have been.

Maud Muller, on a summer's day,

Raked the meadows sweet with hay 

Beneath her torn hat glowed the wealth

Of simple beauty and rustic health. 

Singing, she wrought, and her merry glee

The mock-bird echoed from his tree. 

But, when she glanced to the far-off town,

White from its hill-slope looking down, 

The sweet song died, and a vague unrest

And a nameless longing filled her breast— 

A wish, that she hardly dared to own,

For something better than she had known. 

The Judge rode slowly down the lane,

Smoothing his horse's chestnut mane. 

He drew his bridle in the shade

Of the apple-trees, to greet the maid, 

And ask a draught from the spring that flowed

Through the meadow across the road. 

She stooped where the cool spring bubbled up,

And filled for him her small tin cup, 

And blushed as she gave it, looking down

On her feet so bare, and her tattered gown. 

"Thanks!" said the Judge, "a sweeter draught

From a fairer hand was never quaffed." 

He spoke of the grass and flowers and trees,

Of the singing birds and the humming bees; 

Then talked of the haying, and wondered whether

The cloud in the west would bring foul weather. 

And Maud forgot her briar-torn gown,

And her graceful ankles bare and brown; 

And listened, while a pleasant surprise

Looked from her long-lashed hazel eyes. 

At last, like one who for delay

Seeks a vain excuse, he rode away, 

Maud Muller looked and sighed: "Ah, me!

That I the Judge's bride might be! 

"He would dress me up in silks so fine,

And praise and toast me at his wine. 

"My father should wear a broadcloth coat;

My brother should sail a painted boat. 

"I'd dress my mother so grand and gay,

And the baby should have a new toy each day. 

"And I'd feed the hungry and clothe the poor,

And all should bless me who left our door." 

The Judge looked back as he climbed the hill,

And saw Maud Muller standing still. 

"A form more fair, a face more sweet,

Ne'er hath it been my lot to meet. 

"And her modest answer and graceful air

Show her wise and good as she is fair. 

"Would she were mine, and I to-day,

Like her, a harvester of hay: 

"No doubtful balance of rights and wrongs,

Nor weary lawyers with endless tongues, 

"But low of cattle, and song of birds,

And health, and quiet, and loving words." 

But he thought of his sisters, proud and cold,

And his mother, vain of her rank and gold. 

So, closing his heart, the Judge rode on,

And Maud was left in the field alone. 

But the lawyers smiled that afternoon,

When he hummed in court an old love-tune; 

And the young girl mused beside the well,

Till the rain on the unraked clover fell. 

He wedded a wife of richest dower,

Who lived for fashion, as he for power. 

Yet oft, in his marble hearth's bright glow,

He watched a picture come and go: 

And sweet Maud Muller's hazel eyes

Looked out in their innocent surprise. 

Oft when the wine in his glass was red,

He longed for the wayside well instead; 

And closed his eyes on his garnished rooms,

To dream of meadows and clover-blooms. 

And the proud man sighed, with a secret pain,

"Ah, that I were free again! 

"Free as when I rode that day,

Where the barefoot maiden raked her hay." 

She wedded a man unlearned and poor,

And many children played round her door. 

But care and sorrow, and child-birth pain,

Left their traces on heart and brain. 

And oft, when the summer sun shone hot

On the new-mown hay in the meadow lot, 

And she heard the little spring brook fall

Over the roadside, through the wall, 

In the shade of the apple-tree again

She saw a rider draw his rein, 

And, gazing down with timid grace,

She felt his pleased eyes read her face. 

Sometimes her narrow kitchen walls

Stretched away into stately halls; 

The weary wheel to a spinnet turned,

The tallow candle an astral burned; 

And for him who sat by the chimney lug,

Dozing and grumbling o'er pipe and mug, 

A manly form at her side she saw,

And joy was duty and love was law. 

Then she took up her burden of life again,

Saying only, "It might have been." 

Alas for maiden, alas for Judge,

For rich repiner and household drudge! 

God pity them both! and pity us all,

Who vainly the dreams of youth recall; 

For of all sad words of tongue or pen,

The saddest are these: "It might have been!" 

Ah, well! for us all some sweet hope lies

Deeply buried from human eyes; 

And, in the hereafter, angels may

Roll the stone from its grave away!

Paul Anka definatly wrote, however, about "my way" for Frank Sinatra.

And now the end is here

And so I face that final curtain

My friend I'll make it clear

I'll state my case, of which I'm certain

I've lived a life that's full

I traveled each and every highway

And more, much more

I did it, I did it my way

Regrets, I've had a few

But then again too few to mention

I did what I had to do

I saw it through without exemption

I planned each charted course

Each careful step along the byway

And more, much, much more

I did it, I did it my way

Yes, there were times I'm sure you knew

When I bit off more than I could chew

But through it all, when there was doubt

I ate it up and spit it out

I faced it all and I stood tall and did it my way

For what is a man, what has he got?

If not himself then he has naught

Not to say the things that he truly feels

And not the words of someone who kneels

Let the record shows I took all the blows and did it my way

And Édith Piaf  claimed, likewise, to regret nothing.

Non, rien de rien

Non, je ne regrette rien

Ni le bien, qu'on m'a fait

Ni le mal, tout ça m'est bien égal

Non, rien de rien

Non, je ne regrette rien

C'est payé, balayé, oublié

Je me fous du passé

Avec mes souvenirs

J'ai allumé le feu

Mes chagrins, mes plaisirs

Je n'ai plus besoin d'eux

Balayer les amours

Avec leurs trémolos

Balayer pour toujours

Je repars à zéro

Non, rien de rien

Non, je ne regrette rien

Ni le bien, qu'on m'a fait

Ni le mal, tout ça m'est bien égal

Non, rien de rien

Non, je ne regrette rien

Car ma vie, car mes joies

Aujourd'hui, ça commence avec toi

So what to make of all of that.

Well, maybe they're all correct, in context.  Probably the healthiest view is that of Anka and Piaf, maybe.  If so, it's not one I hold myself.  I wonder what might have been.

People tell me I should not.  But I find myself like Col. Nicholson like that.

Which gets me back, I guess, to the original point of this now overlong essay.  The horrors described in the Canadian example are fairly mis-portrayed, or are to at least some degree, and we know that horrors likewise occurred in the American example that have no religious role in them at all.  And I've earlier written on the example of the Quiet Revolution and its aftermath.  What I suspect, to some degree, all of this tells us is that a lot of people in those examples were not in their real vocations.  They took those ones up for various reasons, but a true calling, at least in some instances, was likely not there.

We can't really expect a calling, for most people, in the secular world.  But inclinations and talents do point us in certain directions.  People discerning a talent for analysis thought I should go into law, something I didn't see in myself.  That habit or inclination is definitely there, however, and spills out constantly on this cyber page.

What I likely didn't and still don't have an inclination for is fighting, which is what arguing really is.  But I've spent a life time doing it now, and apparently am pretty good at.  That brings up another oddity of human nature.  Some people are endowed with talents that they probably realize, but they don't really appreciate in an existential sense.  People endowed with athletic ability, for example, who are disinterested in sports.  People who can argue really well, but don't like arguing.

Even more mysterious is the strong drive towards something that can never be fulfilled, and this too is a central aspect, really, of missed vocations.  Willard Cochrane, an agricultural advisor and economist in the Kennedy administration, worried about the fate of so so farmers, for a lack of a better way to put it.   That is, farmers who were good enough to get by, up until then, but not good enough to get by in the Cold War fence to fence farming regime that the Cold War brought in.  Plenty of people have a deep love of something that is an occupational vocation, in the secular sense, or used to be, but in the modern world, are wholly unable to fulfill it.  People who would have been farmers, ranchers, or whatever, and now cannot be, as the means are not there for most modern people.

Indeed, I think the entire current culture of pet ownership shows that to a degree.  People will pack a dog around to their office jobs or install a cat in an urban office as in a world that better reflected their natures, they'd be around animals all the time. We all would.  In the world we have, we aren't, and we're much the lesser as a result.

Indeed, that gets back to the entire subject here.  I've looked at it in the context of the past.  I.e., women who became nuns as they wanted to be teachers or nurses in Quebec, or men who became Priests as they wanted to be academics.  In my generation and the preceding one, there are lots of men who became lawyers, doctors and dentists because they'd grown up farmers and ranchers, but there was no place on the homestead for them, so they took a professional occupation nearby.

Indeed, also in my generation, and I think in the prior one, the necessity to obtain and keep work was a huge deal, and forms a great deal of the current lack of understanding on the part of these generations and the younger ones.  Having a job was the most important thing about jobs in general.  People sent their children into law, medicine and the like not because they thought their kids would make great lawyers or doctors, but because they'd make money there and those jobs seemed stable.  That no doubt has massively contributed to the large dissatisfaction rate with law that young lawyers have, with some 60% of new lawyers wanting out.

It is, we know, a fallen world.

Cursed is the ground because of you; through painful toil you will eat food from it all the days of your life.

It will produce thorns and thistles for you, and you will eat the plants of the field.

By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground, since from it you were taken; for dust you are and to dust you will return.

Genesis 3.

I guess we can't expect much better.

But I think we do.

The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation. From the desperate city you go into the desperate country, and have to console yourself with the bravery of minks and muskrats. A stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of mankind. There is no play in them, for this comes after work. But it is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things...

Thoreau, Walden.

Where does this lead us?

I'm not sure, but I suppose it behooves us to try to find our vocation and see if we have a calling, and to listen to it.  Consider that deeply and wisely.  Pray about it.

Footnotes.

1. This is where the old text starts.

2.  Part of the older text, showing how much time has passed since I first started working on this thread.