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To: henkster
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.

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.

67 posted on 09/02/2015 2:14:43 PM PDT by chajin ("There is no other name under heaven given among people by which we must be saved." Acts 4:12)
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To: chajin
The Old Testament is replete with innumerable stories of the Chosen People receiving God's blessings, vowing "religiously" never to forget and stray, and then resolutely turning their backs on Him--all as types for us to see our own personal weakness and ultimate need for Him.

"But God found fault with the people and said:
"The time is coming, declares the Lord, when I will make a new covenant
with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah.
It will not be like the covenant I made with their forefathers
when I took them by the hand to lead them out of Egypt,
because they did not remain faithful to my covenant,
and I turned away from them, declares the Lord. ""
Hebrews 8:8-9

69 posted on 09/02/2015 2:52:15 PM PDT by Hebrews 11:6 (Do you REALLY believe that (1) God IS, and (2) God IS GOOD?)
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To: chajin
there is no way anyone could have convinced the Greatest Generation to raise their children any other way than they did

Henkster's Law.

71 posted on 09/02/2015 4:11:59 PM PDT by colorado tanker
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