#538 Musings Beyond the Bunker (Monday December 19)
Good morning,
This is a big week! Today is the first day of Hanukkah. Wednesday is the Winter Solstice. Sunday is Christmas. With today, we begin the period of parties, winter vacations and the march toward the new year.
Out of respect for the holidays and everyone’s busy schedules, and to keep with the hope of the season, I’m going to refrain from my more stinging indictments of those worthy thereof until after the new year. I’m looking for inspiration and a less serious pace as we count down to the new year. I hope you are too.
In a bow to the fact that so many people will be traveling, or otherwise distracted by the holiday parties, or the fact the kids are at home, I’m going to reduce the Musings through the new year to only Monday, Wednesday, Friday and Saturday. You have a break for the next two Tuesdays and Thursdays!
WISDOM
Wisdom is the byproduct of experience (that is, of course, if we accept that we are to learn from our experiences). We also are the recipients of the wisdom of generations of our forebears, who had numerous experiences of their own. In its most basic form, it is the wisdom imparted from our parents and grandparents. But it also is the received wisdom that they passed on to us, as well as the great books we’ve read and the ancient philosophers we’ve studied. Sometimes I feel in our modern times that we fail to reflect on these generations, and how much their experiences and their lessons can inform our lives. I have been comforted, inspired, moved, and taught by words spoken by people who lived interesting lives, encountered myriad challenges, and thought deeply—those with whom I’ve related and those from throughout history.
GENERATIONS
Humans love to generalize things and they love categorization and lists. One of the more amusing is the bunching of entire groups of people in generations that are supposed to share similar traits or perspectives. Astrology is, of course, the silliest of all human groupings (it’s hard for me to imagine the special advice in the newspaper applies to fully 1/12 of the human population).
But generations tend to be more logical divisions of society. The Greatest Generation was, of course, pretty great. They won World War II and the Cold War. The oldest among them lived through the Great Depression. As a generalization, they approached life’s challenges with a stoicism and practicality I think we have tended to eschew.
I love lists and characterizations. Here, then, is a rough categorization of the generations, which I found somewhere (I can’t recall where). Among the interesting observations one might make is that all of the late-20th century presidents came from the Greatest Generation. Then the presidency jumped to the Baby Boomers, bypassing the Silent Generation. One minute it was George H.W. Bush and the next it was Bill Clinton. The Baby Boomers have dominated national politics until Messrs. Trump and Biden came on the scene and gave the Silent Generation its chance. It would not surprise me if Generation X ends up on the short end of the stick (as was the case with the Silent Generation), with the Millennials hogging center stage next.
The Greatest Generation (born 1901-1927)
The Silent Generation (born 1928-1945)
Baby Boomers (born 1946-1964)
Generation X (born 1965-1980)
Millennials (born 1981-1996)
Generation Z (born 1997-2010)
Generation Alpha (born 2011-2025)
GENERATIONS AND NATIVE AMERICANS
Some Native Americans hold that we are connected to (and are answerable to) seven generations. Those seven generations are great-grandparents, grandparents, parents, children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren. In this construct, we are responsible for maintaining the legacy of the three generations that preceded us, two of which we know and one of which we likely don’t. And, in making our decisions, we are responsible for three generations beyond us, two of which we hopefully will know and one who likely will not know us.
The Iroquois (the Haudenosaunee Confederacy) have a similar concept: The Seventh Generation Principle is based upon a philosophy that decisions we make today should result in a sustainable world seven generations in the future.
Both of these perspectives are instructive and visionary. We are responsible to past generations and what they have built—we should learn from their experiences, successes and failures. And we are responsible for passing that wisdom, together with our own experiences, to future generations. We must honor and learn from the past and use that knowledge to ensure a sustainable future. I’m not sure that current generations are fulfilling their responsibility.
A FEW FAVORITE QUOTATIONS FROM THE MUSINGS
In the spirit of recounting the wisdom of prior generations, a few quotations from the Bunker…
“Where they burn books, they will, in the end, burn human beings too.” –Heinrich Heine
“A self that goes on changing is a self that goes on living” –Virginia Woolf
“A popular Government, without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a Prologue to a Farce or a Tragedy; or, perhaps both.” –James Madison
Enjoy your day,
Glenn
From the archives: