From the Greatest Generation to the Ungrateful Generation
Since I won’t be there in person to make your Thanksgiving dinners uncomfortable…
This is a little pre-Thanksgiving post in case anyone wants to rant about something before the holiday, so they don’t get themselves in trouble while passing the gravy. Also, I’m curious to hear your thoughts on a particular topic that got my attention this week.
I read a post the other day that said, “old people are rubbish” and extolled the virtues of young activists. I don’t object to anyone expressing their views, but I was struck by how strange I found it coming from an adult. I didn’t comment because I try not to be a troll on other people’s blogs. But as someone who spends a lot of time with the past, reading archaeology and writing historical fiction, I think “old people” are far from perfect, but have quite a bit more to offer than they are given credit for these days. But I’m beginning to wonder if this view of “old/past people suck” is more common than I knew?
I suppose as a Gen X, I’d be considered “old” by today’s standards, and that’s a good thing, especially when I see how embarrassing, broadly speaking, the thoughts and conduct of younger generations tend to be. But what’s even more embarrassing is the way members of the older generations defer to and venerate youths like they’re wise sages.
WTF is this weird carnivalesque reversal about? Have we taken our obsession with youthfulness to new ridiculous heights? Or is it part of the more extensive “deconstruction” of Western ideas and values that is the project of postmodernism and its philosophical spawn? Whatever it is, it’s fucked up.
Consider the work ethic, ingenuity, and sacrifices of “old people” like the Greatest Generation who were born during World War I, survived the devastating Spanish Flu, faced technological upheavals like the introduction of radio, telephone, and automobiles, experienced the Stock Market crash and the Great Depression. Oh, and they saved the world from fascism in WWII. They managed all of this without becoming unmoored from reality. Rubbish? I don’t think so.
Compare them with the many young people today who eschew science, live on Tik Tok, and expect to get rich on Matrix money. They need trigger warnings, demand we “decolonize” our bookshelves (i.e., ban books), and want to replace our language with Newspeak. And when they can’t have their way, they deface artworks, threaten violence, get people fired, and blame the “system.” These are supposed to be our new role models, our heroes? No, thank you.
They seem willfully ignorant of how grueling life was in the past and what it’s still like in other parts of the world, yet insist they labor under unbearable oppression. Most insultingly and arrogantly, they claim that faced with all the terrible Sophie’s Choices that others had to make throughout history, they in all their courage and wisdom would surely have made the correct ones. Is this how the younger generations express their gratitude for the sacrifices that produced this unprecedented civilization they are privileged to live in?—a world they had no hand in creating but which affords them all the comforts, rights, and freedoms they have grown accustomed to exercising. A civilization whose founders and defenders they seem bent on denigrating. For those so preoccupied with the privilege of everyone else, ingratitude just might be the greatest privilege of all.
Happy Thanksgiving :-)
Feel free to share your thoughts on this or anything else on your mind….
I love reading other peoples' perspectives of what they think it's like to grow old. I don't really know what old is, or aging. I don't really pay attention to it, to be quite honest. Time is fleeting, they say, and they actually say it for good reason. My hair has turned from the salt and pepper grey it used to be, to white...ish. I'm only 64. Today, I had to go in and hand in my retirement papers. I'm out in January. Done. And yet, when I started 45 years ago--in the same place--I never thought I'd work there for that long. I guess you could say I've become complacent to aging. I was told age is 23 years older than you are right now. That puts me at 87. According to my "85 & out" philosophy of life, I'd already be dead. I think the problem people have with aging is that it frightens them. People are afraid to die, afraid to be old, or neglected; afraid of suffering through the ailments they think comes with aging. And, well, there may be some truth to that. But I look at this stage of my life as I enter it, as a chance to do for myself those things I couldn't do when I was helping to raise my family. This time, it's for me. I look at the younger generations and say, Thank God I don't have to go through that shit again.
Thank you for some great thoughts going into the holiday.
I think humanity goes through cycles driven by technological innovation. What did the printing press do to the ruling religious in Europe? The protests of the 60s came on the back of new streams of information (war footage in Vietnam) and the breakdown of trust in the government and governing systems in the country.
The internet has allowed floods of voices to claim authority and question the powerful. Naturally young people gravitate towards questioning the “old guard.” On the positive end of that you see things like the Harvey Weinsteins of the world going to prison after years of abuse. On the negative end we have a rise in intolerance from, in my mind, every “group” of people. I don’t think it will win out in the end.
The total banning of ideas bothers me more than anything. Fortunately I see a lot of backlash to those bans, and rightfully so. I think the pendulum will swing regarding the people of the past as well. We owe them for the world we’ve been given, the good and the bad. And there’s so much good.