Tag Archives: the Silent Generation

Observed

Be It Ever So Humble

This March on my 67th birthday, a Gen Z-er complimented me.

I sat in my favorite Las Vegas watering hole, watching a game, drinking beer, and reading a senior citizens’ bulletin whose main feature was being alert for AI fiscal scams.

On his way out, the sharp-eyed young stamper gave me my due. In his view, I’d been multitasking to the max. He admired that. I wondered if he also saw himself doing the same sort of juggling in 40 years.

Gen Z-ers are usually dismissive of Boomers like me. To them, if Boomers aren’t hogging the wealth of America, we’re lingering in homes we need to vacate for younger generations – theirs – to occupy.

As I love answering about the first, Boomers contributed mightily to America’s wealth. Now, we’re taking our share of the proceeds. Maybe Gen Z will eventually contribute to the national weal. Should it be substantial enough, then it too can take from the trough. Secondly, having bought and maintained the homes others coveted, why should Boomers forsake them? To where would we go? Jump on ice floes and expire? Even if we wanted, we couldn’t. Climate change is shrinking the number of ice floes.

About the above points raised, I never have any compunction offering this remedy to impatient critics of the 1946-64 generation – stop whining, get off your asses, put down the handheld, start learning to hustle and scuff, begin learning how to defer and delay.

Gen Z holds itself back through immediate gratification, short attention spans, and unreasonableness insofar as problem solving. The future develops over time. One must work towards the future. The idea of arriving at the future before taking steps there wouldn’t have even sufficed as a Star Trek premise.

Saw a befuddling billboard recently. It chummed the waters for prospective homeowners who lacked enough cash for down payments. In essence, the financial company trawling for trade offered loans to enable down payments.

That astonished me. Taking out a loan in order to qualify for a mortgage. Doubtlessly in such cases the down payment loan would run at a much higher rate than the mortgage. In any case, the prospective buyer would be saddled with a pair of nuts and two vigs. Looking at it that way, whoever would be desperate enough, financially illiterate enough, to assume this burden might as well start the foreclosure countdown as soon as the last unread bank document got signed.

Numerous members of my family who emerged from the Silent Generation, and plenty of their closest contemporaries owned their own homes. Growing up, living in a house rather than renting an apartment was a common thread among my schoolmates. We could did so because though our parents didn’t spare themselves life’s diversions and comforts, they also worked like dogs. There were plenty of extravagances they denied themselves to put aside sufficient stashes for down payments.

No. New cars every three years and taking their full vacation allotments weren’t extravagances. That was living life and enjoying it. Unlike too many modern-day adults, they could manage money and time.

Most of our parents started their lives in Industrial America as renters. Some lived in what was then known as “transitional housing.” Later to be known as “The Projects.” Little known now, but this municipal housing was to have served as transit stations. Ideally, turnover would be frequent, the residents temporary because urban planners expected they’d adhere to the American Dream of homeownership.

How “transitional housing” became “The Projects,” in whose apartments perpetual generations settled across decades deserves studies worthy of doctorates.

For those who’d heeded “The Projects’” transitory intentions, as well as the cohorts of young postwar couples who’d rented elsewhere, they’d grown up in rural Southern family homes. Substandard, okay ramshackle, as these addresses frequently were, they were already steps ahead by having lived in homes of their own. It wasn’t mystery. It wasn’t adventure. It was a goal.

As they knew, owning the property, residing inside the dwelling atop it lifts the inhabitants a rung. Black or white, possession also confers further rights.

These days, there are debates regarding which is best: owning a home or renting. Surely if the resident has no intent to remain long term, by all means renting is better. However, if the locale settled in will become “home,” tenants should strive to shorten that monthly state which enriches others and find four walls which they can make theirs.

The advantages are clear. Homes appreciate in value. Apartment living only fills landlords’ pockets. If necessary, homeowners can borrow against their properties. This way they can avoid dancing with banks should some emergency or crisis arise needing money. Increasingly fewer apartment dwellers have enough resources if the above comes calling.

They’re not ready for the Spanish Inquisition. But then, who is?

Most of all, there’s just the simple, deep-seated satisfaction behind owning one’s place. Homeowners aren’t beholden to landlords. Banks, yes, until mortgages are paid off. But banks want homeowners to succeed. Banks do not want to carry real estate on their books.

No matter how luxurious the apartment, there remains the fact living in them is just on a month-to-month basis. Furthermore, if landlords want to rid themselves of tenants, laws and courts are weighted against renters.
Homeowners have far greater leeway, and rights when it comes to possible eviction. While never immune to dispossession, householders have more time and room to maneuver.

It’s tougher to dislodge homeowners. The whole process against parties desirous of evicting householders from their addresses is a deliberate one. Which is good. Whereas once the sheriff or marshal arrives at an apartment bearing duly sworn and attested to papers delinquent renters must vacate. Skip any discussion. Just pick up, pack up, and leave. The alternative being free stays in the county hotel and further legal hurdles to clear.

For the most part, the Silent Generation elders I grew up among sought curtailing their rental existences as quickly as possible. While they might not have been capable of articulating it, very few liked their labor adding to strangers’ wealth.

They would’ve confirmed their labor ought have benefited them first and foremost.

Often, they sought overtime at their regular employment like drug fiends seeking another fix. Likelier were Saturday jobs whose cash wages – always cash – went directly into the down payment fund.

Some uncles and plenty of other neighborhood men seldom enjoyed leisurely full weekends. Friday afternoons, evenings, they could be heard on phones arranging work on Saturdays. Aunts, too. Back when suburbia was splendiferous, numerous more affluent homeowners always needed their homes’ interiors cleaned, the properties spiffed up or minor repairs and small alterations performed.

Looking at the above, these same tasks today are mainly performed by Spanish speakers hounded by ICE Gestapo.

As blacks did in an earlier America, the newcomers aren’t complaining about housing affordability. The immigrants, like blacks before them, are focused towards fulfilling dreams by the means available. A lesson so simple it should even get through to Gen Z.

If one is old enough, seeing Latino and Hispanic aspirants into the middle class reminds that upwards mobility depends on drive and desire. Before manual labor became denigrated, many in the rising black middle class didn’t bother worrying themselves with the tasks making them appear menial. What mattered then as now were the extra dollars. Again, as always, in cash.

A motto that served the civil rights movement, “Eyes on the Prize,” also served individuals’ goals. Where the movement strove for justice, fairness, and equality, countless numbers of its foot soldiers wanted a two bed/two bath with lawns front and back and a two-car driveway on one side.

Inside one’s own home, the residents were only beholden to themselves, not the boss or ignoramuses who refused seeing them as human, who denied their humanity. Within the rooms contained in their homes, they could speak freely as well as act without bothersome observation. This aspect of mid-century urban/Industrial American black life isn’t touched upon enough. While nowhere near as prevalent in the 21st century, 75 years ago when blacks were escaping proscriptions mainstream America had erected around them, shutting out pressures that challenged “normal” life in one’s own home could be regarded as finding refuge. Ownership a kind of therapy.

The men and women who benefited from this might’ve been hard-pressed to explain what resulted. Yet had it been explained, they would’ve agreed. Often, it’s difficult for us to recognize what’s occurring within when we’re busy inside working towards it.

© Copyright 2026 by Slow Boat Media LLC

Baboon America

Elsewhere May Day Is Labor Day

This Covid period among our older populace proves that after a time minds become less pliant. In them views narrow then solidify.

When I hear people, say, at least 14 years my senior, opine, they often remind me of an Allen Ginsberg quote. The poet said: “Our heads are round so thought can change direction.”

Life has squared their noggins.

There must come a period in life when our ability to juggle contrary positions against – or even adapt to – what our minds hold as irrevocable erodes. At one point each of us must’ve been mentally nimble. But as many of us age, our ability to modify or rearrange perception and understanding loses fluidity.

It’s not that those hewing tenaciously to fixed positions are simply stubborn. More like their mental processes have congealed. They just can’t budge.

No need to provoke such people. They’ll erupt without cause. The mantra they spew? “Nobody wants to work anymore.”

Popularly known as “the Silent Generation,” they huddle wedged between former NBC news anchor Tom Brokaw’s “Greatest Generation” and “Baby Boomers.” Arriving just before the Depression then shoved onto the periphery of American memory with the first birth of 1946, too few members of this cohort left an impression on our national scene. Also, the calamities that occurred between the years 1929-1945 made prospective parents wary about bringing or being able to afford having children. Their aggregate was lower than the two generations sandwiching them.

Though the Depression and World War II were nowhere near as formative to them as it was upon the participants and combatants, both events nevertheless left imprints. Here in the economically poleaxed America of the1930s and wartime’s Fortress of Democracy, daily life must’ve been maintained at some levels of precariousness.

Each era embedded its own worries upon the still forming.

Unless one’s background affluent during the Depression, want was a constant threat. A job which sustained home and hearth week after week was no certainty. And unlike today, the safety net, if one existed, consisted of savings, family, and perhaps friends. Compared to now, government programs that helped citizens tide over rough patches were meager as well as sparse.

Doubtlessly parents one pay envelope away from being up against it discussed finances in the most sotto tones. Nonetheless careful as they must have been, that sort of constant stress must’ve also reached then affected young minds.

And while the war that broke out among the Europeans in September 1939 was a topic that could be bandied at intellectual remove, Pearl Harbor two years later became a realer than real matter of survival. The Depression’s threat of possible imminent destitution might be diverted through a head down, no boat rocking posture coupled with an “it could be worse” attitude which made them grateful to possess what they had.

The December 7th, 1941, attack became a life and death matter.

Two oceans aside, wolves threatened Americans’ doors. The vast watery expanses which had kept America remote from most global conflicts were by 1941 capable of being crossed by all sorts of weapons. What had been viewed while watching movie theaters’ newsreels – cities obliterated from the air, columns of grim jackbooted troops intent on carnage – now offered foretastes of what America might’ve shared with Europe or Asia.

Easy to imagine that after Pearl Harbor no American regarded fates similar to Rotterdam or Shanghai visiting these shores as “improbable.” At least initially, conversation based on war topics were undoubtedly debated between disbelief and hysteria.

Although dementia and death have substantially reduced those then present as WWII adults, that there was possibly an undercurrent of defeatism during the global conflict’s first disastrous months is difficult to deny. It’s just the sort of thing children can absorb though can’t properly articulate sufficiently in order to have parents explain. Or dispel.

Maybe it becomes a thing that weighs adolescents who enter their teens before becoming adults; that inexplicable thing they unconsciously drag with them through life.

A benefit from Covid is it’s loosened the shackles of American workers. That’s given them leverage against bosses. Terrific!

On one hand, the worker shortage, created from retirements, deaths, and searches for better, stems directly from the disease.

The first a realization by long-time employees they’d gotten to points of simply living to work rather than working to live. Why drop dead at one’s place of employment or linger a few post-retirement years in pain and regret? If the necessary years had accrued – even if the total short – why not abandon that toil and enjoy what remained of life while it still possible?

The second, a factor way too few Americans grasp or want to, is a good number of working people succumbed to Covid. To them, their families, friends, it wasn’t a hoax. Covid wasn’t just jumped-up flu.

Despite the best efforts of right-wing barking heads and jackleg screamers to slander every patient overwhelming ICUs and hospital staffs, sufferers filling wards and providing care in them weren’t crisis actors. For awhile rumors circulated that at my own job Covid claimed one co-worker a week. Of course confidentiality rules and HR doing its utmost to protect the company blunted ascertaining whether this fact or not.

Third, the first two Covid conditions created mobility. Countless current workers are exploiting this last opening. A circumstance anyone constitutionally timid finds adverse.

A worker shortage meant dead-end, low-wage positions, and peonage treatment could be dumped for perhaps more satisfying, higher paying labor where supervisors aware the worm has turned keep their tyrant conduct in check.

That’s what “the Silent Generation” means when it erroneously states “Nobody wants to work anymore.” They’re angered that it appears nobody wants to work as they once did.

Fearful of losing jobs they were grateful to have even if it meant being humiliated throughout a career. For far too many laboring Americans that was the take-it-or-leave-it pact until Covid.

Current attitudes spreading regarding how one’s daily bread is earned reflects badly on “the Silent Generation.” They put up with shit because in return for a comfortable living standard made possible through a decent salary, benefits, and pensions, the boss could release his inner Attila the Hun on them at will. Rotten management will never hide its contempt for the cogs. Before Covid, underlings could be replaced as easily as getting a fresh tissue after soiling the previous sheet.

Then, even getting raises could’ve grown into ordeals. Despite workplace performances justifying the bump how often had the process transformed productive employees into nearly on their knees supplicants?

We may suppose “the Silent Generation” invented some nobility about enduring these trials. We may also suppose them seeing a new generation come along and blithely chucking the old nature for new measures somehow tarnishes whatever glory had shined jobs offering two-weeks-a year vacation.