If my father’s generation failed at anything, it was they did not make my generation better. But maybe that can’t be helped. They wanted us to live better than they did, and so they spoiled us. Just as we spoiled our children.
And now just about everything my father’s generation worked and fought for has been blown on a two-generation bling party.
Oh my, I could write an essay and a half on this; we desperately need to keep this conversation going.
Just one thing. There was a 1948 movie, An Apartment for Peggy, about a postwar couple who might as well be my parents, the way they relate to each other. The GI is trying to go to college, and his bride wheedles them into a walkup attic owned by the college's philosophy professor, who is just the way I would be if it were 1948 instead of today.
Go to the scene where the professor sees their refurbished attic for the first time. You need to watch the whole scene to get the feel for it--to me, it has the eerie feeling of myself getting to talk with my parents six years before I was born, but that is a personal thing. Around 6:30, the GI talks about why he wants to become a teacher, and then his wife rambles on about...well, you need to watch it. But if you're like I was the first time I saw this movie about 20 years ago, you'll be screaming at the couple, "YOU STUPID IDIOTS, YOU'RE GOING TO RAISE A GENERATION OF HIPPIES!"
And then it will hit you. The reason the generation was strong enough to fight the war was because it had become strong enough living through the Depression, and the only way their children could have been as strong as their parents would have been if they had lived through Depression and war, and that was the last thing the generation that had lived through depression and war would have been willing to give their children--there is no way anyone could have convinced the Greatest Generation to raise their children any other way than they did.
Every once in a while, I thank William Holden and Jeanne Crain for introducing me to my parents, and I thank Edmund Gwynn for letting me see myself as an old man when I was still too young to know what it was like to be an old man. But that's a subject for another day.
It can't, beginning with Cain and continuing inexorably since.