The Silent Generation: Going, Going . . .
TV newsman Tom Brokaw wrote a book on our fathers: The Greatest Generation. No one will write anything inspiring about my generation. Even the name attached to us is condescending.
I was sent this summary yesterday. Because I lived in Los Angeles, I did grow up with television, contrary to this list.
Children of THE GREATEST GENERATION
(and their children - so they will understand)
Born in the 1930's and early 40's, we exist as a very special age cohort. We are the Silent Generation.
We are the smallest number of children born since the early 1900's. We are the "last ones."
We are the last generation, climbing out of the depression, who can remember the winds of war and the impact of a world at war which rattled the structure of our daily lives for years.
We are the last to remember ration books for everything from gas to sugar to shoes to stoves.
We saved tin foil and poured fat into tin cans.
We saw cars up on blocks because tires weren't available.
We can remember milk being delivered to our house early in the morning and placed in the "milk box" on the porch.
We are the last to see the gold stars in the front windows of our grieving neighbors whose sons died in the War.
We saw the 'boys' home from the war, build their little houses.
We are the last generation who spent childhood without television; instead, we imagined what we heard on the radio.
As we all like to brag, with no TV, we spent our childhood "playing outside".
We did play outside, and we did play on our own.
There was no little league.
There was no city playground for kids.
The lack of television in our early years meant, for most of us, that we had little real understanding of what the world was like.
On Saturday afternoons, the movies, gave us newsreels of the war sandwiched in between westerns and cartoons.
Telephones were one to a house, often shared (party lines) and hung on the wall.
Computers were called calculators, they only added and were hand cranked; typewriters were driven by pounding fingers, throwing the carriage, and changing the ribbon.
The 'internet' and 'GOOGLE' were words that did not exist.
Newspapers and magazines were written for adults and the news was broadcast on our table radio in the evening by Gabriel Heatter.
As we grew up, the country was exploding with growth.
The G.I. Bill gave returning veterans the means to get an education and spurred colleges to grow.
VA loans fanned a housing boom.
Pent up demand coupled with new installment payment plans put factories to work.
New highways would bring jobs and mobility.
The veterans joined civic clubs and became active in politics.
The radio network expanded from 3 stations to thousands of stations.
Our parents were suddenly free from the confines of the depression and the war, and they threw themselves into exploring opportunities they had never imagined.
We weren't neglected, but we weren't today's all-consuming family focus.
They were glad we played by ourselves until the street lights came on.
They were busy discovering the post war world.
We entered a world of overflowing plenty and opportunity; a world where we were welcomed.
We enjoyed a luxury; we felt secure in our future.
Depression poverty was deep rooted.
Polio was still a crippler.
The Korean War was a dark presage in the early 50s and by mid-decade school children were ducking under desks for Air-Raid training.
Russia built the "Iron Curtain" and China became Red China.
Eisenhower sent the first 'advisers' to Vietnam.
Castro set up camp in Cuba and Khrushchev came to power in Russia.
We are the last generation to experience an interlude when there were no threats to our homeland.
We came of age in the 40s and 50s. The war was over and the cold war, terrorism, "global warming", and perpetual economic insecurity had yet to haunt life with unease.
Only our generation can remember both a time of great war, and a time when our world was secure and full of bright promise and plenty. We have lived through both.
We grew up at the best possible time, a time when the world was getting better, not worse.
We are the Silent Generation - "The Last Ones"
More than 99% of us are either retired or deceased. We feel privileged to have "lived in the best of times"!
This is nostalgia. I'm not big on nostalgia.
I think the world is always getting better in one way or another.
Today, the world is getting better than it has at any time in the history of man. Billions of people who, in 1950, lived in near-starvation and grinding poverty are living in middle-class times. I have offered the example of South Korea, which in 1950 had the per capita output of Uganda.
The development of the Internet, especially Wikipedia, has transformed our knowledge. Entertainment is far cheaper than ever before. Life expectancy has increased for most people in the world.
We no longer live in the shadow of nuclear war. Those of us who were born from 1930 to 1945 lived under that shadow. It is not completely absent, as a recent article by Paul Craig Roberts indicates, but I think the odds are against it.
Our health is much better than it was when we were born. There is far greater social mobility. There is far greater per capita investment. There are far more occupations than ever before, which means that it is far easier for someone to find his niche in life, both in his job and his calling.
In the realm of ethics, things are clearly worse. If that were the focus of this nostalgic peace, I would concur. But there's almost nothing in the piece about ethics. It's all about lifestyle. Lifestyles are always changing. Each generation looks back at the lifestyle of its collective youth, and it reminiscences about the good old days. But nobody wants to go back to the good old days. Nobody who is 80 years old today wants to go back to the medical care, square footage in homes, entertainment, and transportation systems of his youth.
Yes, there was rationing. But a young person did not notice this. I did not notice it. When we are young, the world we comprehend is a limited world. We assume that it is normal. If we are poor, we don't notice. If we are rich, we don't notice. Especially before television, we did not notice. We had nothing to compare our little world with.
Nobody in my generation wants to back to World War II. Nobody wants to worry about the gold stars that were on the windows of American homes. Franklin Roosevelt got this country into World War II, and he was (and remains) beloved as a wartime President because of it. It was great for him, but it wasn't good for the silent generation.
Every generation has its victories. Every generation has its losses. The battlefields today are cultural and moral, which are ultimately wars over religion: first principles and historical sanctions. Western Europe is going through such a war. I think it is losing. It is not clear that the United States is losing that war, but it is clearly not winning it, either. It's more like a stalemate.
For those of us who believe that good wins out over evil in the long run, the times are dark, but they are not black. For those of us who believe that technology is generally liberating, it's a terrific time to live. For a writer, it is the greatest time in history to live. It is marvelous. I would not go back to my IBM Selectric III, let alone my Hermes 3000 portable typewriter. I would not go back to the world in which no one could afford to print his own book. I would not go back to an era in which New York City's liberal publishers had domination over what got printed, a world in which there were only three tiny conservative book publishers: Regnery, Devin-Adair, and Caxton (just barely). I would not want to go back to a time in which The New York Times was making a profit.
In other words, spare me the nostalgia. The future lies ahead. Onward and upward.