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It happens to everyone at one time or
another: you get a tune running through your head that just won’t stop. It’s
been happening to me lately and, as usual, it’s a song from younger days. The
odd thing is that it’s not from my youth, but my mother’s.
Specifically it’s the 1938 Artie Shaw Orchestra recording of Cole
Porter’s “Begin the Beguine.” Starting serene and slow, it builds not quite to
a crescendo but to a dreamy exuberance that, curiously, leaves me both wistful
and a little sad.
My parents were of the generation that came of age in
the years before and during World War II. Children during the depression, they
grew up under hardships that few Americans born later can truly understand. Yet
with little more than determination and self-reliance, they built a society more
prosperous than any that has ever existed.
While many note that World War II is what finally
ended the depression, it’s always been hard for me to view the planet’s most
devastating war as much of a blessing. It’s not overstating the case by much to
say that generation saved the world, or at least kept a large part of it worth
living in.
As remarkable as that period of the 1940s and 50s
was, it was not without serious failings. Women and minorities were not full
partners in society, and the long-term impact of developing technologies often
ignored or not foreseen. Such is the way with mere humanity, however, which
seems never to advance without missteps and outright debacles.
The biggest failure of my parents’ generation may
well have been their inability to fully pass their pioneering spirit and
self-sufficiency on to their progeny, the so-called “Baby Boomers”. My
generation. It’s been lamented that the children of the Baby Boomers, or
“Generation X”, will be the first Americans who won’t have a better standard of
living than their parents. I suspect that will be largely up to the Xers
themselves, who’ll have a much better start at it than their grandparents in any
case. But if it’s true, they can place part of the blame on a generation that
failed to optimize history’s most remarkable legacy.
Too many of us are willing to throw out the baby with
the bathwater in the name of whatever noble-sounding cause of the moment will
mask our unwillingness to risk real-world solutions. Then we declare the
bathwater to be an environmental toxin, assess fines, and bemoan the evils of
bathing. To paraphrase an old cliche: Those who can, do; those who can’t (or
won’t), whine.
Our goal should be to address the unfinished business
of the 40s and 50s with the same ‘can-do’ vigor of our parents. We should drop
barriers to the have-nots rather than raise them for the haves. We should find
realistic ways to clean up our messes and stop making new ones instead of
capriciously threatening whole industries. We should honor success. We should
work to create equal opportunities, not equal outcomes.
I know I speak in generalities. There were plenty of
brooding skeptics in the World War II generation, just as many in mine attack
the world’s troubles with unbridled optimism. And there are plenty of reasons
to believe that we have yet to peak as a culture, that the future holds as much
promise for Americans as ever. But the contrast in the tone and tempo of the
two generations is as clear and distinct as an Artie Shaw clarinet solo.
The Beguine, by the way, is a dance similar to a
tango. My mother says she and my father danced “about a million miles” to
Shaw’s classic recording. Although that version is an instrumental, Cole
Porter’s words continue to haunt, “When I hear people curse the chance that was
wasted, I know too well what they mean ...”
Opportunity does knock more than once, we’re just not
always listening. There’s more than enough for those who would not “curse the
chance that was wasted,” but build off the still-splendid foundation we’ve
inherited.
© 1997 – 2002 Brent Morrison
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