I recently met someone from the WWII generation which Bob Dole has dubbed the Greatest Generation. I have respect for my elders so I called him ‘sir’ and I expected to receive some Buddha-like words of wisdom that I could carry through life. The conversation went something like this:
Me: It’s nice to meet you sir.
Him: I’m from the Greatest Generation.
Me: Your generation won WWII.
Him: And your generation has no values, no respect, and no regard for anyone but yourselves.
Me: I agree things aren’t the same. But we’re not all bad.
Him: With your drugs and your sex and your Godlessness. You’re a worthless bunch of heathens.
I could have agreed and smiled politely, or be the much needed thorn in his side. I went for option three and put an old grumpy bastard in his place:
Me: Weren’t Hitler, Dresden, Castro, and Butch from The Little Rascals part of your generation? And in your generation, black and white people couldn't use the same bathroom.
This effectively ended the conversation and I wondered: were things better back then?
Back then, the Model T averaged 15 miles per gallon and had to be driven backwards up a hill and gas was probably 10 cents a gallon but people made like $.75 a day and were taxed at 91% and they had 13 kids (4 of whom would survive) which them shoe-horned into a one room apartment and walked to school uphill, and with no feet.
To send a letter, you had to dip a pen in an ink well before you pressed it to paper as the Greatest Generation didn’t have a ball point pen. This is nothing compared to the Egyptians who had to first make the paper and crush a few bugs to make ink. And they had to walk up a pyramid in ankle deep sand both ways with a ten ton block on their backs.
Their Greatest Generation’s favorite show, on the three television channels, starred Ralph Kramden, in an apartment the size of my laptop, who threatened to punch his wife in the kisser every episode at a volume that could be classified as megaphone and whose best friend would lose on Wheel of Fortune to Rainman.
My generation doesn’t wait for ketchup to come out of the bottle; we invented the upside down bottle; apparently, the Greatest Generation hadn’t mastered gravity. And I don’t know who mixed up the keys and made the QWERTY keyboard, but it wasn’t one of us. Fast food wasn’t our idea and neither was Vietnam or asbestos or the Hindenburg or the McCarthy hearings or Richard Simmons.
The Greatest Generation didn’t have deodorant or Febreze and the people in the olden days smelled like ass and wore the same shirt for a week before washing it which they did in the same water they bathed in.
The Declaration of Independence said that ‘all men are created equal’ and the Greatest Generation continued this equality unless you were black or gay or handicapped or a woman. Women had no ability to vote or right to work and were considered possessions dealing with premature ejaculation with rubber swords at a time before little blue pills and daily showers and divorce.
Old time condoms were like an off-road truck tire but they were unnecessary as you got hitched to your cousin at 15 and had to play beat-the-clock to put as many babies in her as possible. But this is also the generation who put cocaine in Coca-Cola and used heroin as a cure for morphine addiction.
I have, at times, longed for the good old days where things were a lot easier and simpler. I had a few minutes between longings so I ordered my groceries, paid my bills, balanced the checkbook, uploaded a few CDs, wrote my column for Monday morning, and downloaded a few books, all on my laptop. It took almost twenty minutes to complete as the network was slow. I also emailed my column to the job and I even stopped putting on pants in the morning as my morning commute is about three feet across the hall.
I had a screen-to-screen conversation with my cousin that cost me nothing then took a picture of a contract and emailed it to my agent, all with my cell phone which holds every song I’ve ever heard and games and a camera and a camcorder and e-books and my writing on device the size of a cassette tape.
You might wonder if I feel bad about taking shots at the greatest generation; the answer is no. They’ll never read this as most of them aren’t on the internet, and for the few who are, I have four weeks before the handwritten letters start arriving by pony express.
