How Long Will It Take? Two Generations – If History Is a Guide

My grandmother, even into her late 70’s, had a habit she couldn’t shake. Whenever she received a Christmas present or a birthday present, she would open it with measured care, so as not to rip the wrapping which she would then put into her pocketbook. Later, when she returned home, she’d run a warm iron over the creases in the paper. “It’s as good as new,” she’d say, “and now you can use it again.”

She explained that it was a technique she learned during the Depression, when as a young wife, raising two daughters, she, like millions of Americans across the country had to pinch her pennies. Frugality was a necessary and virtuous way of life and bore no relationship to stinginess.

For the most part, the children growing up in that era – my parents’ generation – carried the memories, but not the parental anxiety, of the Great Depression. They, in turn, became The Greatest Generation, and upon their return from World War II, were the beneficiaries of the largesse of the Federal Government – the GI Bill provided higher education and cheap mortgages, while the creation of the interstate highway system created jobs a plenty.

Flush with a postwar sense of national security if not yet economic comfort, and seldom speaking of the trauma of their years on the battlefield, those children of the Depression raised the Baby Boomer generation, whose primary connection with the dire straits of the decade of the 1930s came from the habits exhibited and the stories told by their elderly grandparents. Just two generations removed from the worst economic crisis in American history, they were detached emotionally from that era.

As those Baby Boomers became young adults, they themselves became the first generation in another cycle of crisis and disaster. For a decade, they fought a war in Southeast Asia – a war that seemed to have no purpose, no end and no friends back home in America. Despite fighting as heroically as their parents had in World War II, they were scorned when they returned to their home country and received little of the Government support that had been heaped upon their parents.

But they, in turn, produced another generation of offspring whose lives were only tangentially tarnished by the blight of Vietnam. And today, the second generation of those baby boomers hardly know the term “The Vietnam War.” In a way, that’s a blessing – we all have moved on.

And now we face a new crisis – one that none of us could have imagined a year ago, despite the warnings by wise people, such as Bill Gates.

Today’s parents, the children of the Baby Boomers now raising their own children, are living their worst nightmare – the possibility that COVID-19, a deadly enemy against which there is, as yet, no weapon, could destroy their family. The virulence of this pandemic is so great, that hardly anyone alive today has any recollection of the last time the world faced this crisis – because it was a full century ago.

All of us will be scarred by this war on COVID-19. But today’s children are much like the children of the Depression parents and the children of Vietnam warriors. They are experiencing it in a different way. Why do mommy and daddy wipe down the groceries before putting them away? Why are their grandparents no longer coming to the house to visit them? Why are there no birthday parties?

Most likely, within a year or two, once a vaccine is available on a global level, life will return to what becomes perhaps a new normal, but the parents of this crisis will never be as carefree as they once were because in the back of their minds they will always fear another COVID lurking in the wings.

The children being raised today will carry an array of memories about how things changed for a time when they were young, but they won’t be scarred with the perpetual fear that their parents are experiencing.

And by the time today’s children become tomorrow’s parents, their own children will think of the time of COVID much as we Baby Boomers think of the Depression – it was something that happened long ago and seemingly far away.