Wishing for Wisdom
Remember when you were little and you saw bad stuff going on? Scary stuff? And you’d run to your parents or other adults and tell them about it? They’d either handle it, or reassure you that it was nothing to worry about.
Because that’s what I want to do right now. I’m seeing some bad stuff going on. Scary stuff. And I’m not sure what to think or do about it. I may be one of the adults, but I wish I could run into the other room where my parents, my aunts, uncles and grandparents are sitting around having a grown-up conversation, and ask them to take care of it. Because I have this suspicion that if more of the Greatest Generation were still here and able, we wouldn’t be in quite as much of a mess around here.
I’m not saying they were perfect. I know the world wasn’t perfect when they were in charge.
But the Greatest Generation—those born between the years 1901 and 1927 lived through one upheaval after another during the 20th Century, and I think they’d have some wisdom to share about how to deal with what’s happening now.
If I’m being honest with myself, though, I know that if I walked into that room today and asked them to help, my Greats would probably say something like, “This is for you to deal with. Put on your boots and your work gloves and do what you know you should.” Because that’s exactly what they’d had to do.
The oldest of that generation came of age about the time of the Spanish Flu epidemic and World War I, and the youngest faced the Great Depression, the Dust Bowl, and World War II before they turned twenty.
Talk about tough.
So as much as I would like to think that they would fix this, the truth is that when I asked my dad for help with a crazy situation, he’d often ask me what I had learned before that I could use to solve the current problem.
Since I’m feeling rather clueless, and wishing for wisdom from the older generations, I thought I’d examine a few things I saw in the Greats I was lucky enough to know.
They knew how to work.
I’ve worked alongside my parents, my aunts and uncles, and my grandparents, and they could work me into the ground. They’d still be at it, long after I was ready to call it quits for the day. They woke before daylight, worked a couple hours before breakfast, and didn’t stop until it was too dark to do any more. They were trying to build a better country and a better life, and they knew it wouldn’t be easy.
They were tenacious in pursuing their dreams.
The financial crisis of the Great Depression put an abrupt stop to my grandmother’s college career. She went back home, married my grandfather and joined the pursuit of his dream of raising Quarter Horses. From Kansas to Colorado they farmed, never losing sight of their goal. Little by little, their horse-raising enterprise grew, into a well-respected line of racing and rodeo stock. And at long last, after their kids had earned their degrees, she returned to college and got her teaching degree.
They knew how to make sacrifices for others.
Our family of seven dropped in to see my great-aunt and -uncle at their Kansas farm one summer afternoon. We all crowded into the kitchen around the heavy wooden table for a glass of something cold and a bite to eat. The loaf of banana bread was sliced, but there was not enough for everyone. My great-uncle, tall, thin, white-haired and smiling in his patched and faded overalls, passed it by and told me something I’ve never forgotten.
“When I was a child,” he said, “the men were always fed first, so that they had the strength to work in the fields and provide for the family. Many a night I went to bed hungry. I swore to myself that when I grew up, I’d never eat until the children were fed. So you all go ahead.”
I was struck by the fact that this meant he never got a turn to eat first. Not as a child, and not as a man.
They weren’t wasteful.
Reduce, reuse and recycle was a way of life for them, long before it became a popular slogan. They didn’t live the consumer-driven lifestyle we see today. A lot of what they had, they made. And once they expended the effort to make it, or spent their hard-earned money on something, you can bet they didn’t toss it out for the newest version a year later.
They believed in the saying “Use it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without.” Because that’s what they had to do to survive.
On my grandmother’s back porch was a neatly folded stack of sugar sacks. I’m not talking fabric flour sacks. Those had already been sewn into something useful. I’m talking about the heavy-weight paper sacks that sugar came in. And right beside it was a ball of the string that she carefully snipped and pulled from the stitched closure at the top. When I wanted to draw, I drew on a paper bag. She used the paper sacks to wrap packages, and then tied them with the string. If everyone lived as carefully, our landfills would not be the problem they are today.
They laughed together.
I remember sitting at the table in my grandmother’s kitchen listening to her toss puns around with her sisters until they were giggling like a bunch of kids. There I was, surrounded by all those white-haired old women covering their mouths with their hands and aprons until tears ran down their faces.
They had faith in a greater power.
Technically my great-grandmother was not actually a member of the Greatest Generation. She was from the one that came before. The one they call the “Lost Generation.” But she was not lost. She was firmly rooted in a belief in the existence of a power greater than anything on this earth, which gave her a certain comfort when the powers of this earth were out of control.
She gave birth to five babies at home, lost her husband to the Spanish Flu epidemic when their oldest child was only five, and never remarried. She weathered both World Wars, the Dust Bowl, the Great Depression, Prohibition and the rise of Communism. She watched the advent of the automobile, airplanes, and spacecraft. She lived through stock market crashes, the Cold War, and the population explosion. Her faith in God is what got her through it all.
They believed in common sense.
Those born from 1928 to 1945 are called the “Silent Generation,” sandwiched by the Greatest Generation and the Baby Boomers. How ironic then, that it was a Silent who gifted me with the most profound bit of advice on common sense.
I like the Collins Dictionary’s definition of common sense, which is: the natural ability to make good judgements and behave sensibly. But his was even better.
As we debated a controversial topic in a committee, the Silent one sitting across from me said he’d always found a certain saying to be a useful guide in situations like this. Smiling, he quoted, “Don’t be so open-minded that your brains fall out.”
I wonder what our generation is teaching the children of today.
Written in honor of my grandparents whose birthdays were September 27.
