Reaction to COLD SHOWER No.1

REACTION TO "COLD SHOWER" No. 1
Date: 3/13/2008 5:11:43 AM Eastern Daylight Time
From: THEDELTAGRPFL

RESPONSE TO THE MANY QUESTIONS THIS MISSIVE GENERATED

First of all, I write these missives to be helpful; for them to be useful.

YES, YOU MAY SHARE THESE "COLD SHOWERS" WITH YOUR FAMILY AND FRIENDS. The copyright warning is because my stuff is sometimes (not often) published without my approval.

I must have hit a nerve as I didn't expect such a response. I cannot answer all of your questions, but I will briefly cover one that has been repeatedly mention, and that is why are times so messed up when they weren't so messed up in "our day," those born in the 1930s.

First of all, I don't know why, and I don't even know if the question is correct.

I do know that our times were simpler although many of us were born:

(1) during The Great Depression;

(2) grew up into young girls and boys during WWII, and

(3) were in high school when the Korean War started, which many of us were drafted into and many others went on to college, and were drafted or enlisted later, but most of us males experienced military service either out of high school or college.

Several things happen with war and the aftermath of war, and this has always been the case.

(1) Society mobilizes, jobs are plentiful because able bodied men are drafted into service, women take up the slack.

(2) When the war is over, when a country is victorious as the US in WWII, the economy explodes, the birthrate explodes, manners and morals explode, and wealth explodes as opportunity opens up everywhere.

(3) "Necessity is the mother of invention," and so war creates new technology which is translated into new civilian technology once hostilities have ended.

(4) The fabric of society is pushed and pulled, punched and pinched, knocked sideways and plummeted into a nightmare of change with nobody in charge.

(5) After WWII, this gave birth to the babyboomer generation, which is now leaving the stage as senior citizens, bruised, bloated, brash, boastful, and ballistic with no anchor, no continuity or countenance, while suffering from every ailment in the book, in fact, creating a whole new periodic table of complaints.

(6) Babyboomers who never trusted anyone over 30, refused to mature beyond that milestone with body tucks, face lifts, and a whole new regiment of cosmetics to hide the ravages of aging, making plastic surgeons the new gods of their cosmetic universe. There were no indices requiring them ever to grow into adulthood, so they didn't.

(7) Now the offspring of babyboomers are parents and have taken center stage. They have become the chauffeur class with televisions in their SUV's to keep the little rascals quiet, giving their babies cell phones and other electronic wonders to know how to cheat in school and live life totally in cyberspace with no apparent need for an anchor. As one psychologist's says, "Go with the flow," as if people had any choice today. It is a full time job for parents to take their little kiddies to soccer practice, ballet, grooming class, to this or that neighbor's house miles away, and always to the mall to buy more new things they don't need to occupy their little minds, which have problems focusing and paying attention.

(8) There is nobody in charge and those in charge are often out to lunch in more ways than one. We have a governor in New York with his dutiful wife at his side resigning from office with all the pomposity associated with a disconnected soul for philandering but not admitting that he has done anything wrong. The irony is that he is accused of an association with a prostitute ring, the very crime that he prosecuted so vigorously, and which elevated him to this high public office. Hypocrisy has become hip. Here in Tampa we have our own version of the same conundrum, as a judge and a stripper are fighting over a joint account. Duplicity is the new social plague to us, but to them it is simply business as usual. We have a local church that is under IRS scrutiny. The husband and wife pastors tell people to take loans out on their homes and give it to "God," which means give it to them for their affluent lifestyle.

Greed and power become insanely important when charity and kindness have been corrupted.

(9) We are out-of-control as a society, and I don't know the answer, but I do know some simple rules that still work, and that is why I share them.

We were spared this maelstrom when I was growing up, not because we were so wonderful, but for possibly these reasons:

(1) most of us were poor, what sociologists call "lover middle class," with one or both of our parents working blue collar jobs;

(2) most of us lived in two-parent families in which the partners stayed together even if they hated each other because it was the thing to do; and

(3) we weren't pressured to be anything but ourselves. We were left pretty much up to our own devices from play to school to jobs or college. We sort of gravitated to these things without much thought. But the point is that we were not rushed to anything at any time.

We never were forced to exercise as mom's and dad's force their kids today to play soccer, or rush them to ballet, and then to basketball practice, then to study groups, and on and on and on.

With parents running a free shuttle service so that their kids can be the best, kids have no time to be kids, but instead are programmed to be ittle soldiers.

We were kids. We played and lived much like rodents play and live, that is, in a narrow proximity to where we were born, going to neighborhood schools, playing in neighborhood playgrounds, reading comic books, hanging out on the corner shooting the breeze until it got dark, and going home, and doing the whole thing all over the next day with hardly a thought that it might be boring.

Many of us got a job in the community when we left school and lived pretty much in that same area all our lives. The extended family could be to great grandparents, and no one thought it a big deal.

That all changed after WWII.

We that left our community lost our anchor and now in old age we reminisce as if our youth were idyllic. When our grandkids hear us talk, they imagine nothing could have been more boring.

True, we sat down to dinner with the family. There was no fast food joints to hang out, in fact there was no place to hang out except the YWCA's Milk Bar or the Knights of Columbus's occasional youth activity. Or we would go to a movie theater at the northend and or one of the two at the southend.

So, you wanted me to answer your questions, and I know I have failed; I know I disappoint, but I don't have the answers. We cannot roll back the clock, cannot change progress, cannot rekindle the family around the kitchen table, cannot make anything as it was, even the church and school are as messed up as everything else.

It won't happen; perhaps it didn't happen as we remember it, but the point is, as my daughter told me one day when she was eleven, she is now 33, "I don't think it is so bad (meaning her day) because it is all I know."

Being a writer, it seems curious to me that I write about "never getting fired" (in this piece) and everyone reads into it "why have we changed so much?" Why, indeed!
JRF