This is a reflection on history, not a sermon, but it begins with a quote from the Bible. Ecclesiastes 7:10: "Say not thou, What is the cause that the former days were better than these? for thou dost not inquire †wisely concerning this."
Did one generation really have a better time to grow up than another generation did?
Should baby-boomers envy or pity the first children of the new millennium?
Well...who were our grandparents? Did they immigrate through Ellis Island, live in slums, work in sweatshops, and die young? All of my grandparents owned land but none of them was rich. One had been in the Great War, had been gassed, and always coughed and seemed alarmingly unhealthy, though he never actually had tuberculosis and lived to a reasonably old age. One developed diabetes just as insulin treatment was being developed; it was anyone's guess whether she'd live or die even with treatment and once, before treatment, she was pronounced dead.
It was very important to some of their elders that most of my elders were, if not ministers, at least teachers, or if not teachers, at least lawyers. They didn't have to practice the professions. If female they could have babies instead, male or female, they could have farms, and on both sides of the family both male and female relatives did construction work. But it was a big status symbol, a hundred years ago, to be qualified to do some work as a teacher, lawyer, or minister. Also, if a man didn't want to fight in the World Wars, it was useful to be a minister. One of my grandfathers scorned that, went to Germany instead of Bible college, and spent the next fifty years coughing. The other one earned a law degree, was offered a job, was assigned the task of defending a criminal who he decided was guilty and deserved the full penalty of the law, and never practiced law again. He described himself as a cowboy.
In the "Roaring Twenties" much was written by and about the "flaming youth," whose poet was Edna St Vincent Millay and whose poem was,
"My candle burns at both ends;
It will not last the night.
But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends,
It gives a lovely light."
They "roared" around spending their money on fads and "riotous living" because they didn't have much reason to expect to get old. The 1920s were plague years. Some of what was written during that period documents how people tried to retreat into "Positive Thinking" and Christian Science, denying how nasty and short many lives were. Other writing faces up to things. The diaries that went into Rita Sims Quillen's novels document the ravages--some small towns had already been decimated by typhoid fever, some by influenza; mine was hit hardest by tuberculosis. Young people would see a friend, apparently well, working, and then the next time they went into town they'd hear how the person had died. Orphans were numerous, and were presumed to be better off if they could stay with any osrt of relative, even a distant relative who might overwork, underfeed, cheat and/or molest them, rather than in a church- or state-run orphanage. People who survived the 1920s were tough and hardy.
This generation of my family was lucky indeed. Dad's father was the eldest of a total of fifteen babies, ten of whom lived to be teenagers. Though their father "started late" as a husband and father, having been born some time around 1850, he lived well into the 1940s, and the children born between 1890 and 1920 were all said to look like him. Ten of the fifteen lived to be teenagers; nine lived to be parents; eight were active grandparents when I was growing up. That kind of survival rate was not come by easily and, in hindsight, it seems to correlate with the family rules of etiquette that I heard derided as being silly and snobbish. The, er um, toffee-nosed members of my family kept a distance from townsfolk, didn't touch anyone in public, didn't sit or stand close enough to touch if it could be avided, didn't visit other people at home, didn't share other people's food, and lived to carry a lot of their town friends' coffins at a lot of funerals.
Mother's parents lived out West where sparser population avoided the plagues, but weird weather made farming unprofitable. They had a song, "This is not home; we only stay'cos we're too poor to move away." If they could sell their "Dust Bowl" farms and move anywhere else, they would. Grandfather gave up being a "cowboy" and became a "back East" farmer in Indiana. Then the T.V.A. commandeered the whole farm-and-market town where Mother grew up, flooded it, and turned it into a lake. Grandparents moved into a city and, being too old for more active employment, bought a boardinghouse near a university and became the houseparents at "The International House." As a teenager Mother always shared her room with an actual roommate and never knew from which country the next older girl would come. Not that the grandparents were pushing Mother to move out.
Mother's parents were more conservative, politically, than Dad's. (Dad's father and his siblings lived communally, when young, and liked the idea of small-scale voluntary "communism," or communalism.) The association of conservative politics with racism, even then, was a local thing. In some places people wanted segregation, in others they didn't. Mother's parents detested bigotry. To them every boarder they took in was a foster child. Some thirty-year-old graduate students want foster parents and some don't. Both of my parents were especially close to two of Mother's foster brothers who came from different parts of India. Neither of them ever planned on having a son-in-law of Indian descent, but they accepted my husband, melanism and all. Because the grandparents believed that "God hath made of one blood all nations" and argued back when people said they shouldn't rent rooms to Black students: "We take students as we find them, individually. X and Y are as nice as any other students. Nobody minds having them in the house." There was real, legitimate fear that Black people might have tuberculosis because some Black ghetto neighborhoods had been especially hard hit. Not everyone trusted the tests that showed all the university students to be TB-free, but my grandparents did.
So although Dad was "legally White" and his grey eyes were generally accepted as validation of Whiteness, yes, the'rents grew up aware of race issues. If you're White you might think a decade before the 1970s was "better" in the United States than the years after 1970. If you're Black, probably not! I knew people who remembered having to board city buses through the back door because, even after antibiotics for TB were developed, there was still fear that Black TB carriers might breathe on the White passengers in the front section. Or "When you, as a member of the Board of Regents at this Black college, go to call on our White sponsors, always go to the back door like a deliveryman." Ick.
Similar considerations might affect your perception of different decades as times to be female. Mother didn't remember the 1940s as a bad time to grow up female and top-heavy. She had respectable parents and protective foster brothers. She told me about only three attempts at date rape, one aggravated by a stated intention to mutilate her face, and felt lucky because she escaped the physical acts of rape and mayhem each time. She grew up accepting that it was normal that teen romance would involve that sort of thing. If you were pretty and popular and talented, even your admirers couldn't be expected to show any real liking or respect for you.
For people who married each other in the absence of liking or respect, doctors used to prescribe "tranquillizers." Later on the shellshocked veterans and battered wives of the 1950s became the twitching, incoherent, "typical" homeless population of the 1980s. People who tried to help populations that became homeless because of inflated property values, workforce reductions, and similar simple-lack-of-money situations thought the homeless experience would drive anyone bonkers, but actually the typical psychiatric profile of a homeless person was someone reacting to the specific side effects of specific prescription drugs. So the 1940s and 1950s weren't a very good time to look for psychiatric help, either.
Nevertheless my parents remembered the 1930s' Great Depression as a happy time of innocent childhood in the care of loving parents, and even the 1940s' War as a time when, well, they were a great deal better off than many people their age, because the war was fought in Europe and the Pacific Ocean.
Mother said she always wore shoes, because tetanus vaccination was not yet known to be effective and tetanus was already known to lurk in Indiana soil. Dad always had shoes, but in warm weather, like most kids his age, he was allowed to save shoes for special occasions--like church--no need to wear shoes to school. School books were handed down until they literally fell apart, and "We always hoped to get books with the backs already torn off, because you could roll them up, stick them in your pockets, and have your hands free" when they took those books home to study. For his generation as for mine, taking books home to study was an embarrassment anyway; homework was assigned but any reasonably bright person did it during the down time in the classroom. Everyone they knew was aware of luxuries they couldn't afford, but everyone had adequate food and clothing. Taking charity from the church or welfare from the state was a disgrace. People who had any self-respect did odd jobs or sold things, if they needed money, and asked neighbors to do odd jobs or sell them things, if they wanted to help. People recognized handouts as a curse to those who give and those to take, trading as the way people prevented poverty.
Eleanor Roosevelt blathered about the poverty in "Appalachia." In my home town people said, well, Appalachia was another town, more than a day's walk away. Dad learned about real poverty when he got to Germany. All boys his age at least claimed to want to go to Germany and stomp on Hitler. Many of them did go to Germany, but by that time Hitler had already killed himself and the problem for Army officers was to limit "fraternization" between GI's and the widows, orphans, and grandparents who were still alive. Everywhere our troops were sent in Europe they found people trying to rebuild and recover, felt empathy, hoarded their own rations and gave treats to orphans when they could. For years afterward they told my generation to eat our vegetables because somewhere a poor orphan wanted those vegetables.
I may have heard more about orphans than the average baby-boomer. Dad earned a B.S. in engineering, but he finished his degree in Florida, at a school that was accredited only in Florida, so his diploma didn't yield any relevant job offers in places where he and Mother wanted to live. His elders wanted him to have a graduate degree in one of "The Professions" so he became a Reverend Doctor of a little church in California, but, like the grandfather who never practiced law, Dad never took money for preaching, nor did he perform weddings or baptisms. The church in California appealed to Dad because, after determining that a man had read the Bible, they officially accepted his right to teach whatever understanding of the Bible he had reached, or support any other churches he could in conscience support, as long as he sent some money to the church's official mission in Mexico. Dad apparently sent money to the orphanage in Mexico every year, but he certainly wasn't going to show any favoritism for Mexican orphans over any other orphans. He was on mailing lists, when I was growing up. Our house was full of appeals on behalf of orphans around the world. Dad kept the letters and photos to share with adults who might send money, of course, but he shared them with us children first. "See, here is a little girl just like you, only because she's lost her parents and she lives in India, she doesn't have a room full of toys or a closet full of pretty clothes like you. She has to stand in line and wait for a bowl of rice every day. That's all. Just the rice. No milk and sugar. No shelf of books, either. If she's lucky she might be able to read a few school books at some sort of school, some year. When you feel like complaining about what you have, just remember little Suri here."
My brother and I often played "school," as children. We were going to have a big boarding school, bringing in other adults as needed of course, and take in all of those orphans. We got tired of hearing about them, but we wished them well, and wanted to feed them all the green beans and zucchini they supposedly wanted, and share our books and toys with them.
So, were the 1960s or 1970s good times to grow up in? Of course they were. I was there. I remember it well. People my age were young, we adjusted our expectations to our time and place, and most of us were healthy and eupeptic.
"The air's hazy with pollution," I used to hear from one anti-car elder or another. (It was not part of any religion or enforced on younger family members, but in the 1940s all of one branch of the family above about age fifteen had taken a vow to resist the fad for motor vehicles, and some still rode and drove horses.) "You'll never see as clear a view as we used to know. The ground's been so polluted, with filth and chemicals and broken glass, it's not safe for you to go barefoot the way we used to do. Oh, the mess they're making in Vietnam where your cousins are is likely to keep 'escalating' on into a real war, with Russia, and bombs and poison gas everywhere. You, young man, might have to go overseas and get killed. You, young lady, might meet the man you want to marry, and then he'd have to go overseas and get killed. And then there's this drug thing, I pray youall can keep clear of that, but there are evildoers who will feed young people drugs. Oh, this is a terrible time to be young. I might like to be younger and healthier again, but I wouldn't trade places with you!"
But for those who were actually young, living with devoted parents, it was still a good time to be young. Miniskirts were not for me, the parents said, and I didn't feel inclined to argue. On occasions too dressy for jeans and T-shirts I wore the new fashion, stitched by Mother at home, from remnants on sales at the fabric store: the polyester leisure suit. Let's just say that, when women my age started buying our own clothes, we didn't even consider polyester. It got to be a bad joke, fast.
There was abundant food for angst when baby-boomers were growing up. When we were feeling teen angst we could always blame the headline news. Much of their contents was blameworthy, Heaven knows. Most of it did not directly affect our lives. I remember reading some of the headlines, watching the TV news clips (my town didn't pick up TV broadcasts until 1977, but for anti-car people my parents spent a lot of time on the road). Sometimes it seemed unreal, a joke; I'd hear a grown man wailing about the fact that the Vice-President's given name was "Spiro," as if he were to blame for that. We thought that was a hoot. I remember a night in a motel we spent cackling about it. Every time the laughter started to fade Dad would think of something else to say that had the name "Spiro" in it and we'd laugh like loons again. You had to be there. Life lesson learned: if other people are determined to put somebody called "Spiro" into public office, you might as well laugh as cry. (For the very young: the real problem was not his name, but his attitude toward my generation, which was unsympathetic, especially to our complaints about useless dumbed-down pre-choice schools and the mess in Vietnam. He wasn't going to help with those problems.)
Some of my generation's angst was just plain silly. "Never trust anyone over age thirty," my generation was exhorted by a lad who was close to that age himself. Hello? My mother was thirty years old when I was born. She agreed that human beings are frail and fallible, to be trusted only to a certain degree, but I did know I could sleep in a car when she was driving it.
(Some of the disparity between what the media reported about generations of Americans, and what Americans actually saw, had to do with the fact that human generations aren't all one length. In my father's family the generations are mostly thirty years apart. Early marriage was legal, though it seems always to have been a low-status indicator, in Virginia so some families' generations are eighteen or even fifteen years apart. You might expect that people who postpone marriage until they're thirty would have one child or none, but in reality, sometimes they have ten or more. Then if an older child, usually a daughter, marries at twenty, an aunt or uncle might be born in the same year as a niece or nephew. I have a young second cousin who was born just a week before his eldest nephew was. I remember giving him extra prezzies so he could have the pleasure of being an uncle, handing things down to his nephew...)
The 1980s were definitely better than previous decades to be a young woman who needs to start paying bills before she's finished a suitable degree for a job she wants to keep. We were entrepreneurs. We were "accidental managers." I was so lucky, when I called other people to do the jobs I didn't have time to do, they were all friends and got along and kept the network going even when I was out of town. Business was so much more fun than being bored housewives, especially for those of us whose doctors thought a baby-free life was a wise choice.
The 1980s were definitely not such a good time to be a kid, in one way. Mothers working rather than being bored housewives meant nobody at home in suburban neighborhoods during the day, nobody kids could call for help. Before the 1980s it was understood that children between ages five or six or so and fifteen or so are perfectly competent to look after themselves, and their parents' homes, in ordinary circumstances and need only to be able to call on an adult to help in emergencies. Kids played outdoors, alone or in packs, and earned a quarter here and a dollar there doing odd jobs, and even baby-sat real babies who needed to be sat beside. In the 1980s most of the hysteria about child molesters came from the pseudomemories formed by early cases of Prozac Dementia, but some of it was real. Kids could not be allowed to carry their own keys, let themselves into their own homes after school, play or study or watch TV until a parent got in from work, because in most neighborhoods parents could no longer say "If anything is really wrong, say if you come home and the house is on fire, just go to the Vanzettis' house down the street." Mrs. Vanzetti wouldn't be at home either. After-school activities had been a bit of a yuppie thing, sometimes bewailed as taking away free time or study time, for my generation. For the next generation they became obligatory.
The whole twentieth century was not a good time to be an introvert, actually. Among many false and harmful ideas Sigmund Freud made popular was the one that extrovert tendencies ought to be indulged or encouraged. The history of civilized societies had formerly consisted, to a considerable extent, of teaching extroverts to act like human beings, speak when they're spoken to and not before, keep their word and be on time for any plans they've made, not expect to be entertained or talked to when people have not made plans that include them, stick to a budget, control their appetites, take the time to do things right, generally not become social pests. Freud "cured" the "neuroses" of "repressed" extroverts by encouraging them in self-indulgent behavior. From this came an idea that society as a whole would be saner if everybody acted like self-indulgent extroverts. Now those of us who didn't want to yap at people who had other things to do, "forget" plans, "drop in on" people who weren't prepared to be visited, get drunk, get fat, go bankrupt, spread diseases, "grab hamburgers" instead of cooking good meals, have unwanted babies and/or abortions, or generally mess up our lives by acting like out-of-control extroverts, were told we were the ones who were "neurotic." Civilization probably can recover from this, and I say the sooner the better, but the cost to what should have been our better minds has been enormous. The deterioration of the arts...don't get me started. The discovery that introversion is an hereditary physical trait, with its implication that discrimination against us in business is as evil as race discrimination, and even that extroversion needs to be recognized as a sort of mild disability since it comes from incomplete neurological development of the part of the brain that includes the conscience, has yet to reach its full effect on society but its effect has certainly been good.
My generation as a group loathed racism and generally eradicated it, which is why malcontents continue to scream about it. If you didn't vote for Barack Obama, or agree with his politics, you still had to admit that he was a class act. He looked presidential. It is possible for a triracial person to look presidential! Previous generations didn't see that. We do. We even think it's possible for a "pure" Black person like Ben Carson to look presidential. In a recent presidential election, the fiscal conservative vote was split between Cruz and Carson. Cruz. Not an English name. Candidate Cruz spoke good English but there was a time when ethnic-minority White candidates weren't considered presidential either. In that way I think real improvements have been made.
And of course we liked computers. The slight gain in I.Q. scores produced by increasing cultural sophistication (more people grew up with books and bank accounts, so more people learned about those things at earlier ages) was nothing to the discovery that, when people are exposed to computers at an early age, they take to computers intuitively and develop apps that the previous generation of engineers couldn't even imagine. Obviously I think computers are delightful toys, and so do my e-friends, or we wouldn't be doing things like blogging. Equally obviously, the wrong uses of computers are already myriad, threatening to become more so, and computers may yet be used to lead us into World War III or a Frankenstein world, Orwell's world, either of Margaret Atwood's equally gruesome future-to-be-avoided worlds, or who knows what might even manage to be worse.
Today's young people...I don't know. Like us, they seem to want to work out their own solutions to their own problems. Like us, they have things to blame their elders for, and things to thank us for.
Young people have always been clueless and had immature personalities. This has not changed. We see them--for most older people, this "them" includes all younger people except our own children and grandchildren, and for some it includes them too--and think they look like wretched messes. This is an indication that it's time for the exercise in humility, or humiliation, known as Sharing Those School Yearbooks With the Kids. We were clueless, had immature personalities, and looked like wretched messes at that age, too.
Hey, at least I'm consistent. I didn't think much of the crop of nineteen-year-olds coming up into college when I was twenty-five. I don't think much of the current crop now. I didn't think much of myself when I was nineteen, either. If anything I've come to feel more empathy for nineteen-year-olds now that I'm out of danger of being mistaken for one of them. I just think the first few years of adulthood, when people are just beginning to figure out how they're going to be adults, are a horrible stage of life that people who don't have to be that age, or be the parents or teachers of people that age, should charitably try not to notice. But I do see encouraging signs that The Nephews and most of their friends are going to be worthy heirs of their elders.
There may be exceptions. I don't see the current King of England as having much chance of living up to the Queen's record on much of anything. Then again, most of the past Kings of England couldn't be favorably compared with Elizabeth II either. And the problems facing the King are greater than, but do not include, being young.
People who are nineteen today do not have the educational opportunities people who were nineteen had in 1980, no. This web site has already considered the monstrous overgrowth of college debt. If the young earn college degrees and are offered jobs in the traditional way, they'll be lucky to pay off their debts and be able to look for a house of their own around the time the women become too old to have children. There are ways the brightest will be able to work around this, and for those who've read Charlotte Iserbyt's book on what some educationists hope the current education system will lead to, there are ways to take advantage of the work-arounds and avoid the worst consequences Iserbyt describes.
One thing my generation need to think about, with which I'd like to stop for today...actually leads us back to the Bible, although this is not meant to be a religious post. Non-Christians are free to think of the Bible as merely an influential historical document, here. The Bible describes a system of land management that minimized poverty for as long as people abided by it. Of course, when they adopted a monarchy, it took only a few generations for a corrupt monarch to foul up the system and all but destroy the nation; but, apart from that, the system worked.
And this is how it goes: When the nation of Israel organized itself, an agreement was reached--we are not told by what procedure--dividing the available land among the founding families. Note well, although "the stranger" who passed through ancient Israel, renting or working for or married into the old families, had rights and was to be treated with respect, there was no suggestion that "the stranger" needed to be equal with those who had inherited property. Land could not, ever, be finally sold as long as any descendants of the original owner were alive. Land use could be sold for up to fifty years at a time but, every fifty years, all titles reverted to the heirs of the original owner. All land was privately owned but every Israelite had some land rights, because their culture would have punished any landowner who let relatives "starve at his gate."
And yes, people were motivated, not to starve or otherwise get rid of their elders or other living people, but to limit the size of their families. That was one reason why the book of Proverbs suggests that a young man might be tempted by a neighbor's wife (the situation is described in such specific terms that readers probably knew whom Solomon had in mind) and that he should be faithful to his own wife and...Proverbs 5:19 may have sounded more like a poetic phrase in Hebrew than it does in King James' English, how could it not, but it also describes one of the really reliable methods of birth control.
We may not need to open this topic for national discussion (what the Left really fear is not that it might be "racist" but that it wouldn't be "racist" enough) but one thing we can do, today, is select young people who appreciate the benefit of one home, their base for life even if they rent it out and live somewhere else for a while. If we don't have children or grandchildren who qualify, adopt some who do. Then, instead of selling our own homes to move into "care homes" if we get old enough, entail our homes to them, let them move in and provide the security we need unless and until we actually need medical care, and leave them the security of owning houses and land. The economy can do without realtors very much better than children can do without decent homes where they can play, and keep pets, and cultivate gardens.
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