How Could We Have Been So Stupid?

Since daytime television programming is so terrible, I chanced upon The History Channel that was detailing the Hippies generation. (Mine.) I watched, enrapt. They told it like it was, even to the point of mentioning that we rejected our parents' values....wanting to set up our own utopian society.

Know what I thought? How stupid were we??

My father was the only person in his family to graduate from high school. He was one of the 25 top athletes in the state of Illinois his senior year, which gave him a scholarship to college. He was a child of the Great Depression...never having enough to eat. I have his account book where he accounted for every cent of what he spent in college.

He met my mother who, as a child of a farming family, had enough to eat. They had a big vegetable garden, and chickens/pigs/cows for meat. I think he thought he had died and gone to Heaven.

When Dad graduated from college, he married Mom, then WWII happened. He took a commission in the Navy Reserve. Both Mom and Dad sacrificed to make things happen for our country, and for us.

For years and years, my father worked as a teacher, coach, Navy officer, and mill worker. He wanted his children to have a better life than he had. I didn't appreciate it then. I do now!

Once upon a time, I was the Youth Director at my church in Pontiac, IL. I can remember sitting among the kids with them telling me that their life was tougher than mine was, as a kid. I had a flashback, remembering a time when I said the same thing to my dear mother. "You had it easier than we do!" Mom should have rankled. She should have told me that I was an ungrateful whelp, since she had been through the Great Depression, two wars without her husband, a fire that burned her house to the ground, and the tragic death of a child...but she didn't. What she said to me was, "You're right." She disarmed me!

I was a child of my generation. I was against the war in Vietnam, but thank God I didn't have the guts to express that, out of respect for my father's place in the military! (My younger brother was less respectful in his expressions about the war. He and Dad had many arguments about it.)

My parents worked their collective fannies off for us. Mom, Dad...I apologize for my generation's seeming non-understanding of what you went through for us. Each generation has to atone for what they didn't understand about the last one. I hope my own daughter will come to figure out why I am so passionate about what I have worked so hard for, all these years. We keep passing the torch. !