You are what you were when...

Back in the late 1970's, a professor at the University of Colorado ( I think in psychology) did a film series entitled 'You Are What You Were When'. The gist of it was that the culture, the key world events, and your personal life experiences during your growing up years shape you in a way that stays with you the rest of your life, and to understand any particular generation you need to understand the key events that shaped their life while growing up. For those of us whose parents grew up during the Great Depression, we heard over and over about how tough life was in the 1930's, how a job is not to be taken lightly, how important it is to 'save for a rainy day', how we need to understand 'the value of money', and so forth. The severity of the Depression, the 25% national unemployment, the malnutrition they endured, all of those things had a profound impact on how they viewed the world, and they wanted to transmit those values to us who lived in much more prosperous times. Then the Depression ended in a global war, that brought yet another kind of hardship, often too difficult to even talk about. They sometimes lamented that the message did not fully get through to us the way they had hoped.

Recently Beloit College published their annual list about the mindset of this year's entering freshman class at colleges around the country. The list takes note of things such as this new class thinks email is too slow,  their phones never had cords to twist while you talk on the phone, Czechoslovakia never existed in their life, Russians and Americans always lived and worked together in space, and they never lived under the threat of nuclear missile attack. Even 9/11 is a distant memory to many of them now, half a lifetime ago. As with my parents, many of things that shaped my world view like the Cold War, nuclear attack drills at school, the Vietnam war, 'the pill', civil rights marches and riots, The Silent Spring, The Population Bomb, and double-digit inflation are all part of a distant history to my children, who are all older than this new class. Also like my parents,  I know of no way to really transmit how those things impacted my thinking in a way that comes close to living through them. Again like my parents, I also sometimes wonder if I have done a good enough job in transmitting values about faith, money, defense, the environment (and skepticism in the predictions made about it), family and any number of things.

In that regard the current recession will no doubt have considerable teaching power for things I could only talk about. Attitudes toward debt, jobs, the stock market are undergoing shifts now that will be part of lived reality for this generation. It will no doubt have an impact.

Now I am glad that I heard those Depression stories over and over again. I heard it enough that I at least could understand why my parents and grandparents viewed things the way they did. It does remind me, though, that we older folks need to pause to think about what has shaped the lives of our children and how different it was to the things we often assume as 'givens'. And we need to keep on telling the stories.