The Last of the Great Depression Era Babies

Black Tuesday is fast approaching and we, oblivious to the warnings, continue on with our daily lives none the wiser. Collapsing completely on October 29, 1929, the catastrophic implosion of the New York Stock Exchange marked the official beginning of an economic depression that was to wrap itself tightly around the whole of the industrialized Western world. Successfully squeezing out its lifeblood for ten bleak and lengthy years, we now look back at that time and reflect: Can the generations of today, born into frivolousness (we waste because we can) overcome years of learned behaviors to become as stalwart and resourceful as our grandparents once were?

As they disappear from our lives, the men and women of the Greatest Generation take their silent place amongst other memories from the past and are relegated in our minds and history books to a position of iconic admiration. There was a time when we, their grandbabies, were regaled with the stories of their lives: their hardships and their triumphs. Their experiences defined their values and in turn affected how they raised their children. They gave birth to the Baby Boomers who became our parents. We are two generations anchored by a third that tried to remind us, if only through their actions, what it meant to live and consume responsibly. This direct (and fading) link makes us the last of the Great Depression Era babies.

Depression Era Babies, especially those from a stronger ethnic background, were taught that to waste was akin to breaking one of the Commandments. A wayward nail or screw found on the walk home (up hill, both ways) was pocketed because of its potential for future use. A penny was never scoffed at or stepped over; haggling for the best price was once a refined and admired skill lost to the consumers of today. Gardening and canning were commonplace; leftovers were saved, and the remnants from the preparation of one meal were incorporated into another: you never threw away "the best part".

There was pride and a clear sense of self, whereas today we have adulterated those traits into the growing religion of Selfism. Our world is made up of the two "I's": one represents the individual, and the other symbolizes the individuals combined to form the group collective. "We" is a nonexistent pronoun in the Gatsby-esque worlds we have created for ourselves. Yet we once lived as if we had the potential to incorporate into our lives what was taught to us by our grandparents. We cleared our plates because there were "children starving in Ethiopia" and we glued together paper chains to reach across the nation to prove that indeed, "We Are the World".

Have we now become so far removed from our collective national history that we are imbued with a sense of never-ending prosperity that will prevent a period like the Great Depression from ever happening again? Is the potential we once had to remember from whence we came and learn from the stories handed down to us obscured by the push to continue forward living our lives without incorporating the wisdom of the past?

As the Greatest Generation continues to fade, so does our memory. When that anchor is finally loosed completely from its moorings, we may well have lost the potential to regain the intergenerational connectivity that taught us to respect ourselves, to respect others, and to respect the world in which we live. We have a formidable task to undertake to ensure that their memory lives on so that we may thrive. The anniversary of Black Tuesday shouldn't be allowed to pass us by without a reminder of our duties as the last of the generation who remembers - as the last of the Great Depression Era Babies.