"Many have lost their appreciation for how good we have it. They have become selfish, egotistical, and ungrateful. People of today could learn a lot from the greatest generation... if only they could, or would, listen. For those people born between roughly 1901 to 1924, Tom Brokaw coined the term the Greatest Generation. I truly feel sorry for people who have never had the opportunity (and probably never will) to interact with them.
There was the 1918 Spanish Flu Pandemic, World War I, and the Great Depression. They came of age when the unemployment rate was around 30%. That continued for about 10 years. Then, just as the economy was turning around, Pearl Harbor was attacked. Food, gas... everything, was rationed or was just not available. Millions of men went off to war; tens of thousands of them died. The war time was as bad as the Depression. After World War II, the economy improved, but then they went through the cold war, the polio epidemic, the social unrest of the 1960's and the gas lines and economic upheaval of the 1970's.
Through all of that hardship, they not only won a world war, they practically rebuilt Europe and Japan, they cured polio, they put a man on the moon, and managed to pass the Civil Rights Act. They did all of that (and a lot more) without endless lawsuits, without endless bitching about how "it's not fair," or "what about me," or "it's my right." They faced the challenges with grace, dignity, and hard work. They overcame and adapted. They said to themselves, "Let's tackle this problem," and then they moved on to the next one. They only asked for government help when it was truly needed, and they were willing to compromise. Democrats and Republicans lived next door to each other and actually got along. They just went out and did whatever it was that needed to be done.
Were they perfect? No, they weren't, and they'd be the first ones to tell you that. However, if this lockdown happened to them, I bet they would handle it a hell of a lot better than we currently are. Their attitude would have been, "If this is what we need to do to end the pandemic, then that's what we'll do." Unlike today, they would not think they were actually smarter than the scientists who are studying the disease.
The problem is, times have been too good for too long. People of today have never lived through really tough times. Our rough patches have been short and tame in comparison to those of the greatest generation... and they thrived. We have lost their appreciation for how good we have it. We have become selfish, egotistical, and ungrateful. We have no idea how to handle real adversity. People of today could learn a lot from the greatest generation... if only they could, or would, listen."
The above Facebook post prompted me to write this memory. My grandparents were born between 1890 and 1898, so they almost fit into the time frame Tom Brokaw wrote about, and they certainly lived through all those events.
My mom often described how her parents always encouraged an attitude of "roll with the punches, figure out what needs to be done and do it, hard work, and problem solving." Their attitude of self-reliance and confidence helped their children to not be afraid during tough times.
My grandpa was drafted in WWII, and left for the west coast. My grandma stayed in Des Moines with two little girls, sold the car, house, and furniture, and brought the kids by train out to Oregon to set up housekeeping there, largely alone. This was all during a time when 1.) women didn't do that! 2.) food and gas were being rationed, and 3.) they were just coming out of the Depression.
But both my mom and her sister remember it as a huge adventure! They trusted their parents to solve each problem as it arose, and they did. They learned to dig clams on the beach to supplement the meat rationing. They bought used clothing and sheets, remodeled them and dyed them black to comply with the nighttime blackout curtain rules of wartime. There were many more stories of teaching my mother by example what it means to live your life from a problem-solving outlook, and not letting the external circumstances affect your own personal attitude and happiness.
Here's a picture of my mother Evelyn, about age 6, with her sister Geraldine, about age 4, with their mother, my grandmother, Doris Giebrich Kast.
This picture is five or six years earlier than the story above, but it's the closest one I could find. As in many families, there aren't very many pictures of the mother, because they are always the one taking the picture!
My dad's parents struggled through the Great Depression as share-cropper farmers on rented farms in South Dakota. My grandpa came from Denmark at age 14 and made his way on his own. There was hunger, danger, death, and bankruptcy. But the family survived, and all the kids grew up and made their own way in the world. There are no pictures of my dad's childhood. Extreme poverty does not allow for a camera.
