More reminiscences of a garrulous geezer.
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| Not breakfast at my house, then or now. Image by Jo Justino from Pixabay |
"Whenever I think of the past it brings back so many memories."
-Steven Wright
Dear Gentlereaders,
Beginning with this column, I'm no longer committed to publishing a new missive every Saturday but I will be publishing a new, lengthier, column approximately every two weeks. Please stay tuned.
Fear not, I remain committed to writing these letters/columns, and many of my millions of gentlereaders have expressed a desire for longer letters anyway.
{I doubt any of our gentlereaders are living in fear of a lack of letters on your part.}
Welcome back boys, girls, and others. In our last episode, Dana asked me what was so cool about being a child of working-class parents with lots of kids and little money back in my day when the Baby Boom exploded.
Answer: Dumb luck and good timing.
I, and my fellow Boomers, didn't come along till after the Great Depression had been overcome and the Second World War won, two back-to-back globe-spanning crises that killed off multiple millions and laid waste to no shortage of other countries.
If you were lucky enough to be a kid, particularly before about 1965 — when things got weird and our current era began — you benefited from the traditional American zeitgeist, an economic boom, and the birth of modern technology.
You hit a trifecta without even making a bet.
Of course, life was hard for most and terrible for many as it always has been and always will be. I/We need to proceed carefully. Nostalgia and our unreliable memories often generate a golden glow; sucky circumstances can morph into fond remembrances with the passage of time.
Big BUT, that's not going to keep me from posting a paean to my childhood, specifically to my life prior to reaching the age of reason.
{The Age of Reason? Just how old are you?}
When I was a kid attending a traditional Catholic grade school, much of second grade focused on preparing us for our First Holy Communion as it was assumed that we had more or less reached the age of reason. This is (according to the newadvent.org Catholic encyclopedia), "The name given to that period of human life at which persons are deemed to begin to be morally responsible."
On a related note, if you were a Roman Catholic kid "back in the day," particularly if you attended Catholic school but no longer consider yourself a Roman Catholic, the website quoted above can update you on how much things have changed over the years. Quite interesting.
{Fascinating. When do we get to the cool stuff?}
This is cool stuff, Dana. Any traditions that are actually cultural RBFDs with long histories behind them (as opposed to say kindergarten commencement ceremonies) provide firm foundations to stand on. Just as importantly, if you decide to reject a given tradition, it provides something real to rebel against.
Being a rebel without a cause, or a clue, isn't romantic, it's merely embracing teenage angst as a lifestyle.
Once upon a time in a country called the United States of America, there was a rough but widespread consensus. Although our country had/has its sins and flaws — having been created by H. sapiens, a notoriously flawed species — it was a product of something called Western Civilization which has roots that reach back thousands of years.
Thousands of years of having to get out of bed in the morning and do what you had to do to keep you and yours fed, clothed, sheltered, and as safe as possible given your circumstances at the time, resulted in some hard-learned lessons.
Please be sure to take note of the italicized phrase circumstances at the time.
The traditional family, and some version/notion of a higher power — be it God, or at least ideals to strive for even once you're wise enough to realize you'll never quite reach them but are wise enough to keep trying anyway — worked/works rather well.
A Judeo-Christian spiritual tradition provided/provides a moral/ethical framework that worked/works well even for those who were/are "culturally" Christian or Jewish (GRIN).
{Your love of the slash can be/often is very annoying.}
Caveat: Much sin has been committed in the name of religion, and of course, other religious/spiritual traditions can thrive in a Western country if its adherents are willing to live and let live, and like a civilized gentleperson, avoid stepping on the toes of others...as much as possible.
{Fascinating. When do we get to the cool stuff?}
I also must point out that the current epidemic of "illegitimate" parenting (there are no illegitimate children) will not be cured by attempting to turn back time. It just ain't gonna happen. While we shouldn't neglect explaining to the kids the why and how of the nuclear family and other traditions with proven track records, as always, life happens while you're making other plans.
We need to look reality in the eye, not fear change, and try to come up with real-world solutions that work in today's real world. I have a few ideas, but ideas are like butt...wrinkles, everybody has some, and I confess I have no world-changing revelations to offer.
When I was a kid Wokies and Critical Theory(ies) were already loose in the world but hadn't reached critical mass.
If a visitor from the future had arrived in a time machine and tried to convince people that in the relatively near future, the Woke Mind virus had escaped the lab (the universities) and had become a pandemic, they wouldn't believe it.
But a time machine? Why not? Disneyland opened in '55 and included Tomorrowland where you could catch a virtual rocket to the moon; the future was so bright we were all wearing shades. In 1962, in the middle of the Space Race, JFK challenged the nation to put a man person on the moon by the end of the decade, why not? So we did.
{Who were we racing?}
Not a who, a what, the U.S.S.R., and Marxism, an ideology responsible for more deaths than all the other -ologies put together. We won, but certain diehards are hanging on in certain places Marxism being a reliable cover story for blood and power-thirsty thugs.
And in the meantime, some frustrated intellectuals, pissed off because most of the proletariat preferred joining the bourgeoise to violent revolution, created Critical Theory since the Deplorables were/are too damn dumb to realize that everything wrong with their lives is the result of adhering to the traditional mores of Western Civilization...and caucasian, male, H. sapiens of course.
Wokies of the world, unite!
{Fascinating, when do we get to the cool stuff?}
Sorry, you know how I get...
In my semi-humble opinion, having enough choices, but not an excessive amount of choices, choices made without the mediation of computer/smartphone screens is why I think my analog childhood was cool.
The cultural Rules&Regs that existed at the time didn't all make sense, and some needed to be altered or even radically changed (the term Jim Crow immediately springs to mind). Still, a rough consensus is required if a household, or a country, is to run relatively smoothly and a kid can be a kid for a few minutes before being dragged to his/her/their first drag queen story hour.
Burning down the house, or country, and starting from scratch because you believe that changing human nature, ASAP, ain't a big deal, is simply not a defensible position for any rational grownup to maintain and it's why we're in the fix we're in.
Too many choices + too few restrictions - a sense of history = our current national mental health crisis.
When I was a kid, other than window screens to take the edge off of the lack of air conditioning, the only video screen in our house was the one on our black-and-white TV. It came with an antenna with aluminum foil signal boosters but often stopped providing content after The Tonight Show was over.
Music, books, video, etc used an analog format that by definition suffered from all sorts of limitations. This forced my fellow Boomers and me to spend an inordinate amount of time together in meatspace as cyberspace didn't exist yet.
Fortunately, there were a lot of us and although almost everyone I knew had a mum and a dad — believe it or not, divorce was not something that was taken lightly, and single parents were relatively rare — we were left to our own devices for hours on end.
For example, a lot of baseball (still the national pastime at the time) was played at/on "The Field" in my inner city neighborhood. It was just that, a field, in which well-worn paths connected the bases and a home run was a fly ball hitting the wall of the building that bordered the opposite end of The Field from home plate.
The Field also featured an abandoned car for playing in and on. The top half of the field, which sloped down from the Boulevard of the Allies mentioned in our last episode, was more or less grass-covered and was used for all sorts of things, and there was no schedule.
Somehow, this was accomplished without the benefit of adult supervision, and to the best of my knowledge no one was killed. Although injuries were commonplace, this was considered normal, life happens.
Luckily, fleets of battered, rusty white vans manned by pedophiles roaming the roads in search of victims were not yet a thing. Being sent to a corner store several blocks from your house with a note (please give Mark a pack of unfiltered Kools and a loaf...) and some cash at a relatively tender age was not only reasonably safe (there were protocols in place for dealing with local ne'er-do-wells) it could be fun.
"Hey, Mum, can I get a..."
No! and come straight home.
All the way there I'd be carefully scanning the environment for lost change. A penny could buy a penny pretzel stick, or gumball from a colorful machine that might also award you a prize. If you stumbled across the rare and elusive glass, quart soda pop bottle you could turn it in at the store for 5¢ and get five pieces of penny candy, or a full-sized candy bar, or a pack of baseball cards, or...
Everyone knew, knew of, or could easily find out who you were, or who your parents were, so you had to think twice about getting up to no good, or about disrespecting any adults you might encounter lest they turn up at your house to discuss things with your parents.
I remember this one time when... never mind.
I could go on... I could mention more upsides from this period of my life and/or I could mention the downsides of life in the Stone Age. I could confess that I'm a bit of a hypocrite in that given a choice I wouldn't give up the internet, and many other technological advancements.
I know how lucky I was given the terrible things that didn't happen to me, like not contracting polio for example, having been vaccinated. I believe I mentioned the power of dumb luck and good timing.
Big BUT, as I apparently never tire of repeating, we Boomers accidentally tossed out the tot with the Jacuzzi water.
I wish I knew of a way to fix it so that kids nowadays have a chance to be kids for a few minutes, with a full-time mum (or dad) till at least first grade and lots of other kids to play with instead of being parked in daycare, and then preschool (which incidentally, doesn't work).
Colonel Cranky
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