George Rebane

I am 83, still functioning but past my prime. Most of the college professors and high-school teachers in my cohort have already been shuffled out of the classroom. I concede I shouldn’t be running for president or chairman of a board at my age. I’m terrible at understanding new trends and technologies. But history and literature—the events and works of the past—don’t change at all. All we can do is to try to understand why long-gone people did what they did and said what they said.

So writes retired Prof Wight Martindale Jr (here) as he looks back and looks around at what useful functions we older people can still perform, and especially to our newest generation itching to make their mark.  I too am in my eighties and share most of the good professor’s thoughts about some of the unique things those with many birthdays can do for our young.  These past many years readers have been subjected to my own particular outlook, biases, and predilections presented in an unabashed style, big words and all.

I view the eighties as one of life’s special decades, one in which many of us still retain most of our marbles and memories, and one from which most of us will exit on a gurney.  In the US fewer than two out of five males reaching eighty will see ninety.   Females fare better, almost half of them reaching eighty will reach ninety.  But any way you cut it, in your eighties you have arrived in the ‘decade of dreaded diseases and death’.  So, while you hope for the best, have your exit plan in place.

It seems to me that one of the more important roles we octogenarians can play in the lives of the younger, is to remind them constantly that the human experience encompasses more than what they are now witnessing and anticipating.  The younger are necessarily in the business of preparation and building their lives, for them the future is the focus because it is only there that they will be able to enjoy the fruits of their current labors.  Trying to figure out how to turn their ‘now’ into their very important ‘then’ is all that seems to matter.  But understanding that previous generations experienced the same challenges, in very different and usually more challenging environments, is rare. But when that perspective is embraced and used to make current decisions, such practice comes under the rubrics of maturity and wisdom.  Often it does pay to sit through an oldster starting out, ‘Well, in my day …’.

I consider myself fortunate for having had the propensity as a youngster to seek out and sit through such stories, whether in a one-on-one session or just as a fly-on-the-wall bystander hearing a senior orating how it was.  From first-person knowledge gained from such sessions, not only was I able to connect taught history with contemporaneous personal history, but I also learned the syntax and colloquialisms of times gone by.  Their subsequent judicious use always made it easy for me to join and benefit from social and business conversations with older people, for I spoke their language.  For a young man during gatherings, such displays of apparent ‘wisdom beyond their years’ was always well received, often noted, and today mostly overlooked by our young.

Looking the other way over the years, I have had the pleasure of meeting a number of outstanding young people similarly ‘tuned’, hear their unique perspectives tying today with yesterday, and watch their careers advance.  In private conversations, I was not surprised to find that they too had spent considerable time sitting and listening at older knees, and still found value in doing so.

At this point it would be proper to launch into a catalogue of compare-and-contrast examples of lost knowledge from previous generations.  I’ll just regale the reader with one important but radical change in today’s rearing of our young vs such practices in years past.  As late as the start of the last century, disease still took the lives of many children, therefore, to compensate, parents brought an appropriate number into the world.

Most cultures have looked at children as ignorant, partially formed adults, and treated them as such when it came to contributing to the family’s weal.  The kids of bygone years all started pulling their weight early, whether in schooling for those wealthier, or joining the workforce for the hoi polloi.  Kids were appropriately valued relative to skilled/educated adults.  It took many years and resources to make one of the latter, but only nine months plus a few years to get a new one going should another youngster be lost.  The adult/child tradeoff was very pragmatic in days of yore.

While some of the more draconian practices of child rearing and discipline began to wear off as healthcare improved, more children survived childhood, and fewer children were born.  Supply and demand made them into a scarcer ‘commodity’ to families, and their value increased commensurately.  All this said, by mid-century children were still treated as being members of a hearty, resilient, and responsible cohort of the human population.  I was a paperboy at ten, farm worker at 13, in an industrial machine shop at 16, and aerospace draftsman at 19.  And in less developed countries they didn’t wait even that long to make kids into revenue producers.

Starting in the 1960s radical changes began taking place in how children were to be treated, succored, and allowed to work.  Actually, the poorer ghetto kids continued to ‘enjoy’ the ability to work at almost any age, including join gangs and hustle drugs.  But children of the bourgeoisie, and even the proletariat, were removed from workforce by various laws, codes, and regulations putting employers at high risk for hiring the young.  Not only that but schools started teaching the little darlins that they had rights which more often than not superseded those of their elders, and especially their parents.

The younger set picked up on this right away and started exploiting their peerage based on mismatched doses of privilege vs responsibility.  Without going through the long harangue of child rights history, we today have a generation of young people who are considered frangible in every possible way by most, especially the woke part, of our society. The extra helping in this perspective is that we consider this deficit in our children to be the new, enlightened, and modern understanding of the human young, maintaining it well into what was formerly considered as adulthood.  The inevitable ‘damage’ done during their childhood years often mandates visits to the analyst’s couch to enable them to face the rigors of their daily grind.  It seems it’s almost fashionable today for everyone to have a lifetime ‘rent-a-buddy’.

More than in times past, today children have become a high cost, high maintenance segment of society.  As an example, witness the number and cost of administrative staff vs teachers at our schools and academies.  Typically, such institutions require more than twice as many bureaucrats than teachers to monitor and administer all the extra government programs to assure that the little darlins are inclusively welcomed, equitably cared for, and their daily needs funded through myriads of taxpayer paid programs and grants.  And the cry goes out daily that we still don’t have enough funds to satisfy their real needs.  Steadily declining scores on merit-based tests seem to bear that out.

So now, as we face the Singularity and the Great Reset, you have a sliver of what this brave new world looks like to someone in excess of eight decades of birthdays under their belt.  In my own case, I have been doubly blessed in the life experiences I’ve been granted and in the course my life has taken.  I have been in the heart of mankind’s biggest war, after which we went through a phase of extreme poverty that taught resilience and improvisation.  I was privileged to come to the greatest country in the world, and grow up in it during its glory years.  I learned to work and discover the value of work at a very young age.  I was provided the opportunity to get the education I wanted, in the process becoming a lifelong student and teacher.  I had a career that kept me at a leading edge of technology developments, the expansion of human knowledge, and the founding/operating of businesses that employed people who provided for their families.

However, my biggest blessing by far has been finding my life’s partner at an early age, raising our family with her, and going through all the joys and sorrows that a full life provides.  Of the sorrows, we have had our litany of dreaded diseases and tragedies which had us bury our parents, one child, and one grandchild.  The clan – our arrows into the future – today is made up of two children, six grandchildren, (soon) six great-grandchildren, and divers nieces, nephews, and cousins.  We have celebrated our kids growing up, building our family nests, supporting our grandkids education, and launching their new careers.

And all this was made possible by the steadfast love, wisdom, and strength of my beloved bride who was always there through the highest highs and lowest lows.  Growing old with my sweetie-pie has been the greatest blessing.  My gratitude for her knows no bounds.