I have become more and more astonished at how, as I came out about the World War II Generation, nobody acted outraged. But I find that it really just needs someone to state it to begin to bring out the rage young, and not so young, people feel about a sellout they are, in fact, aware of.
As Shari’s example showed, humor is a great way to reach people. It is also a way to hit on seething, really dangerous resentments. When I am on the elevator with young people, and we speak, I will sometimes launch into the “You have it easy. Why, when I was a boy I had to walk twenty miles to school IN THE SNOW!”
I haven’t yet met one, even a teenager, who couldn’t chime in with something like, “Uphill both ways!” They seem to appreciate an old guy making fun of this sort of crap they have been subjected to.
I am a bit surprised that young people even KNOW of a word like “whippersnappers.” Where did they see it or hear it? You can say, “like a chicken with its head cut off” and be understood. But even people my age have seldom seen a chicken with its head cut off outside of a supermarket. My youth was a LONG time ago, but even then I was in an environment that was a century out of date. I saw lots of chickens running around after their head had been removed, but the army brats and the people in the city didn’t.
They used to talk all the time about “the generation gap.” But I don’t see one today. There seem to be about as many old race traitors as young ones. And when it comes to things like the group that calls itself The Greatest Generation, all of us, from fourteen to seventy, feel cheated out of what our own forefathers built and what we had a right to. We are ALL tired of apologizing and groveling for being white.
There is not a Generation Gap. There is a Guts Gap, the guts to stop treating those who cheated us with respect and to get down, maybe using humor as a cautious first step, to what is bothering us ALL.
#1 by Peter on 01/07/2007 - 5:30 pm
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My father was at the tailend of the “greatest generation” After H.S. he joined the navy. It was 1944 and he was only 17, but his parents had divorced three yrs. before and his Dad died that summer. Not a good time in his life. He was never sent over seas but when he got out he was amazed at how fast everything had changed. He didn’t take the GI bill. It wasn’t long before older friends and family were doing very well but kept talking poor poor! He had an anger all the years I was growing up, but didn’t see the racial thing, that you did. It just wasn’t on our radar screen out here until the late sixties, and then it could still be ignored. Never the less hs. and college education was having it’s effect with my generation, but I couldn’t get along with it. I”dropped out” of college after two yrs. Couldn’t understand how to pay attention to it. When my children came along in the seventies and 1980, I couldn’t understand why EVERYTHING was a trend not to be resisted and most did not. By now, when I see what my own children and others are up against and WHY. Well, I’ve gone from hunkered down depressed to angry. Angry actually feels lighter when you can see more of the WHY of it.
I remember chickens with their heads cut off. When I was a little girl I watched my Dad do it QWICK. When they settled down they were scalded and plucked. PHEW! Shari
#2 by Tom on 01/07/2007 - 8:55 pm
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a guts gap, I’ve never heard it put any better.
This puts a name to something I’ve observed too often.
ps. I first heard whippersnapers years ago when a yankee was making fun of me.