Boomer

“ Even the winners are ill-prepared to live in a treeless, waterless country from which nothing can be gathered for a year. Back to civilization the boomers wearily march, on horseback, on foot, in wagons,—and the prairie schooners again, with their stoves, and chairs, and babies, and chickens,—but what a changed lot from the expectant, excited boomers of a few days ago! ”

“ They were men of deep convictions and enthusiasms, unmindful of laughter or ridicule, caring little even for approbation.
No "boom town" can possibly produce a genius: it only fosters sundry small Napoleons of finance. America is a nation of boomers—financial, political, social and theological. ”

“ And the next minute Pawnee Brown and Clemmer were gone. Dick watched them out of sight and a warm feeling went over his heart.
"The major is as generous as he is brave," he murmured. "He is one scout of a thousand. No wonder all the boomers asked him to lead them in this expedition." ”

“ There were legitimate people who really wanted homes and were willing to work for them. There was a large class too of shiftless, chronic boomers from the entire West, whose lives had been spent in looking for something for nothing. There were chronic wanderers seeking sensation. ”

“ Many of our generation glamorized casual sex and drug use, evaded responsibility, and trashed authority. Today, the boomers are middle-aged and middle class. The responsibility of having families has helped many recover traditional values. And of course, the great majority of those in the middle class survived the turbulent legacy of the sixties and seventies. But many of the poor, with less to fall back on, did not. The intergenerational poverty that troubles us so much today is predominantly a poverty of values. ”

“ The colours of life in youth and age appear different, as the face of nature in spring and winter. And how can children credit the assertions of parents, which their own eyes show them to be false?
"Few parents act in such a manner as much to enforce their maxims by the credit of their lives. The old man trusts wholly to slow contrivance and gradual progression: the youth expects to force his way by genius, vigour, and precipitance. The old man pays regard to riches, and the youth reverences virtue. The old man deifies prudence: the youth commits himself to magnanimity and chance. ”

“ And when the younger generation points out that flats are so convenient because you can leave them, the older generation shakes its head and wonders why one should want to. In a future, which I glimpse clearly enough, I see many more causes of disquiet for the older generation, and I wonder with a certain fear whether I, too, shall not be dismayed when I become the older generation. For the destruction of the old home is extending now much farther than bricks and mortar. It is touching the center of human life, the kitchen. ”

“ One finds them always, but one rarely sees them fall. So it is our youth drops from us, - scales off, sapless and lifeless, and lays bare the tender and immature fresh growth of old age. Looked at collectively, the changes of old age appear as a series of personal insults and indignities, terminating at last in death, which Sir Thomas Browne has called “the very disgrace and ignominy of our nature.” ”

“ Shall well-trained old men, then, fear what youth, and they not only untrained, but even fresh from the country, despise?—In fine, satiety of life, as it seems to me, creates satiety of pursuits of every kind. There are certain pursuits belonging to boyhood; do grown-up young men therefore long for them? There are others appertaining to early youth; are they required in the sedate period of life which we call middle age? This, too, has its own pursuits, and they are not sought in old age. ”

“ One of the basic grievances of this older generation against the younger of to-day, with its social agitation, its religious heresy, its presumptive individuality, its economic restlessness, is that all this makes it uncomfortable. When you have found growing older to be a process of the reconciliation of the spirit to life, it is decidedly disconcerting to have some youngster come along and point out the irreconcilable things in the universe. ”

“ The teaching of the old days was as bad as it could be, the training was haphazard work, reckless alike of physiology and psychology; but our grandfathers and grandmothers had one saving principle, which, for the last two or three decades, we have been, of set purpose, labouring to lose. They, of the older generation, recognised children as reasonable beings, persons of mind and conscience like themselves, but needing their guidance and control, as having neither knowledge nor experience. ”

“ In this stratum of society, although the young are often underfed and the middle aged overworked, the old have the hardest time. The burden of the aged falls hardest upon the children, who must get a work certificate as soon as possible to help feed their grandparents. The old generally have a horror of going to an institution ”

“ On the other hand, I think we detect, not only in these returns but in life, a tendency to prefer associates of the next generation, that is, those of such an age that they might have been our own children. Some old men especially state that they prefer the society of men of middle life and it has often been thought that young teachers are best for young and older teachers for older children and that the young have a certain attraction for those near the age limits of their parents. ”

“ It is here that youth’s quarrel with the elder generation comes in. There is no scorn so fierce as that of youth for the inertia of older men. The lack of adjustment to the ideas of youth’s elders and betters, one of the permanent tragedies of life, is certainly the most sensational aspect of youth. That the inertia of the older people is wisdom, and not impotence, is a theory that you will never induce youth to believe for an instant. The stupidity and cruelties of their management of the world fill youth with an intolerant rage. ”

“ Old people complain that young people are grown too independent, disobedient, saucy, and what not. It is too true, frightfully, miserably true, that there is not the same reverence for parents as there was a generation back;—that the children break loose from their parents, spend their parents’ money, choose their own road in life, their own politics, their own religion, alas! ”

“ The common school-house, the poor man’s college, is hardly known, showing how little interest is felt in the chief treasures of the State, the immortal minds of the multitude who are not born to wealth. The signs of premature old age are visibly impressed upon everything that meets the eye. ”

“ When we were summoned to a joint consultation, our views as to the proper course of treatment seldom agreed. Doubtless he thought I ought to have deferred to his seniority in years; but I held the doctrine which youth deems a truth and age a paradox,—namely, that in science the young men are the practical elders, inasmuch as they are schooled in the latest experiences science has gathered up, while their seniors are cramped by the dogmas they were schooled to believe when the world was some decades the younger. ”

“ In my middle forties business associates have asked me for the recipe for perennial youth. Before reaching my fortieth year, possibly no other male was so horrified as myself at the thought of waning youth and approaching old age. But now (1918) , in my middle forties, I am reconciled to growing old.
I am rather vain, and have been guilty of contemplating my reflection in a mirror. Prior to my middle forties I was of a bashful disposition and lacked self-confidence, except when following out my fairie instincts. ”

“ I, too, seemed old; felt the old age that parents feel when the younger generation has left them, when they are needed no longer by the new manhood and womanhood, when they begin to be pushed back to the past. ”

“ Taking the five primary divisions, infancy, childhood, youth, manhood, old age, each of these has its own three periods of immaturity, complete development, and decline. I recognize an _old_ baby at once,--with its "pipe and mug," (a stick of candy and a porringer,) --so does everybody; and an old child shedding its milk-teeth is only a little prototype of the old man shedding his permanent ones. Fifty or thereabouts is only the childhood, as it were, of old age ”

“ Some minds are young and growing at seventy while others seem to cross some invisible deadline at forty. But of all this we have no settled criteria and the age of customary or enforced retirement is arbitrary, though very diversely fixed by various industrial concerns, pension systems, etc., without regard to mental age or youth. In fact, the world has so far attempted almost nothing that could be called a curriculum for the later years of life—physical, intellectual, moral, social, or even hygienic or religious, after the very variable period when the prime of life is reached and passed. ”

“ But how many of the younger generation would eagerly long for such interpretations if the older would only reveal them! And how little plausible is that experience when it is occasionally interpreted! No, enthusiasm, passion for ideas, sensuality, religious fervor,—all the heated weapons with which the younger generation attacks the world, seem only to make the older generation uneasy. ”

“ Old men mourn over the folly and recklessness of the Young, who, in the fresh and balmy spring-time of life, recoil from the confinement of the desk or the study, and long for active occupation, in which all their beating energies may find employment. ”

“ So a series of sad persecutions took place.
It became the land of extreme youth. Middle age was merely a struggle; old age was a time when failure could not be disguised, or a time of success which did not satisfy. ”

“ The reality is that the middle-aged generation (the parents of the rising generation) brought them into the world and is educating or miseducating them, or just ignoring their educational needs. If the middle-years or older generations are indignant at the rising generation, who is really at fault? Who shirked their responsibilities to their children and grandchildren? ”

“ It must therefore be the work of generations to make those judgments; it is only the undying society, in its continuity and undistinguished generations, which can make them, and if they are to be true, the fire and hope of youth are as essential components as the inertness and conservatism of age. ”

“ Certain it is that even those who do not make a clean break with their past develop views, interests, habits, modes of life, personal associations, or perhaps take pleasure in becoming novices, apprentices, or amateurs, in new fields and find thus a certain rejuvenation, the strong instinct for which has found so many unworthy forms of expression that the term “second childhood” as applied to age is commonly one of reproach and the affectations of youth by the old are ridiculous. ”

“ The household image of old age, of human infirmity, and of domestic hearths, are all meant as a machinery for provoking and soliciting the fearful idea to which they are placed in collision, and as so many repelling poles. ”

“ The aged, from the loneliness of their situation, the want of active employment, and an enfeebled state of health, are apt to look upon the world with a gloomy eye; and sometimes their gloom is not unmixed with bitterness: hence arises the complaint of their harshness and asperity towards the follies of youth. These evils, so naturally growing out of their isolated situation, would seldom gain power over the old, if they were accustomed to gentleness, attention, and deference from the young ”

“ The clearest conception of the state brought about will be gained, by supposing the society thus produced to consist of old people. Age differs from maturity and youth in being less able to withstand influences that tend to derange the functions, as well as less able to bear the efforts needed to get the food, clothing, and shelter, by which resistance to these influences may be carried on ”

“ It is natural, and it is right, that they should wish to rise above that old, dull, dead level in which their mothers and grandmothers worked from youth to age. The world has gone on since then—it is a world of education, books, and wider sympathies. ”

“ He holds that, while the great men excelled in memory, imagination is perhaps still more a youthful condition of eminence; magnifies the stimulus of poverty, the fact that elder sons become prominent nearly twice as often as younger ones; and raises the question whether too exuberant physical development does not dull genius and talent.
One striking and cardinal fact never to be forgotten considering its each and every phenomenon and stage is that the experiences of adolescence are extremely transitory and very easily forgotten, so that they are often totally lost to the adult consciousness. ”

“ Probably 80 percent of the people in this body are of the baby boom generation. And what we are doing is burying our heads in the sand and passing what we know is a huge problem--which is going to occur because all the people who are going to create this problem exist and they are going to retire--we are going to pass that problem on to our children and say: You figure it out, even though it is a problem we created. ”

“ We cannot help these gropings toward a new dispensation and their very persistence is the best reason for believing that they will sometime find their goal in a better stage of things and an improved race of men not in another world but here. Perhaps some of even what we now call the whimsies of the old will be seen to be the labor pains of humanity, which is striving thus to surpass itself, to improve the stock, and to really bring in a new and higher type of man.
Old age is called second childhood. ”