“We can never get Dad to do anything. As soon as he gets home from work, he’s playing video games … or posting on Facebook … or downloading porn.”
Those are things you never heard in my house when I was growing up, and not just because there were no video games, Facebook or downloadable porn in the ’50s and ’60s. The truth is that unless your dad was a drunk or some other sort of bum, he wasn’t looking for all sorts of ways he could have fun.
Look at it this way: The last generation to grow up without television in the home may also have been the last generation that was far more concerned with their responsibilities than their rights.
Sadly, most of them are gone now. The very youngest Baby Boomers are 51 this year, so the youngest parents from our parents’ generation are in their 70s. All of my friends have lost either one or both of their parents, and the ones still alive are far past three score and 10.
I don’t think I ever heard my father say, “Hey, I need some me time.” He didn’t have a bowling night, or a night he went out and drank beer with his buddies. He may not have been a Ward Cleaver who kept his white shirt and tie on till bedtime, but I never saw my dad — or any of my friends’ dads — sitting around in their underwear watching television.
I wish I could say I didn’t spend all sorts of time on the computer when my kids were growing up, but at least I didn’t download porn. And I do think I was there most of the time when my kids needed me. Neither of them have gone on shooting sprees yet.
When I look at myself and my friends and compare us to our fathers, I find myself amazed at just how far from the tree some of the apples fell. I have no friends — and I include myself in this — of whom I could say they surpassed their fathers’ accomplishments.
I’ll bet we had more fun. For some reason, that mattered to us.
We like to think we were the generation that stopped a war and brought down a president (or two), but if we’re honest with ourselves. we’re like the dog that chased a car and finally caught one. We had no idea what to do with it. We didn’t change much. There have been far worse presidents since Lyndon Johnson or Richard Nixon and there have been far stupider wars since Vietnam.
Generations are actually sort of weird to figure anyway. We’re the Baby Boomers and our parents were the so-called Greatest Generation. But there was also the generation that came of age in the 1950s (the Silent Generation) and the one that tucked in half a generation before our parents (the Lost Generation).
What it really all comes down to is knowing what matters and behaving accordingly. Things are a lot tougher for kids these days, and it seems like the people making the rules are getting dumber and dumber.
Take zero tolerance rules, for example. None of us want kids taking weapons to school, but it’s pushing it to expel kids for bringing toy guns to school. There have even been cases where kids have been suspended for forming their hand into the shape of a pistol and pretending to shoot.
Speech restrictions too. There have been cases of kids being suspended or even expelled from school for using a particular word known as a racial slur, even in cases where it was only used in a historical or explanatory context. Numerous educators don’t want students reading “Huckleberry Finn,” inarguably one of the greatest American novels ever, because of the use of that same word in it.
It makes it more difficult for parents. Imagine your kid coming home and telling you that his school isn’t studying the writing of Thomas Jefferson because he owned slaves, or that Abraham Lincoln wasn’t a great American because he didn’t really care about freeing the slaves.
Or telling you things that you knew from your own lifetime weren’t true, that Lyndon Johnson didn’t really care about the civil rights bills he got through Congress.
I was 13 when Martin Luther King gave his “I have a dream speech” and 18 when he was murdered in Memphis. Two months later, Bobby Kennedy was killed in Los Angeles and a tremendous amount of idealism and hope seemed just to vanish into the clouds.
My daughter was born the year Ronald Reagan was elected president and my son joined us 10 days after Reagan’s second inauguration. They have grown up in an era of flawed men in the White House, although both of them were able to get excited about Barack Obama.
Both Pauline and Virgile were products of my wife’s first marriage, although I have been a big part of their lives for nearly 30 years. Both are in early middle age now and doing exceptionally well in their chosen careers as officers in the Foreign Service.
My late father, the smartest man I ever knew, pointed out to one of my sisters that our generation had some things more difficult than his did. He didn’t have to make decisions about health insurance or a pension. Those were part of the benefits that went with his job.
He put his family ahead of everything else in his life in a way I was only able to aspire to. Any success I had as a parent was due to having kids who were better and easier to raise than I was.
And Pauline is raising three children of her own how. Artemis is 13, Lex is 10 and Albanie is 7.
All three seem exceptional to me, and Arti has already done something I never did, getting the opportunity to meet and shake hands with the president of the United States when he visited the American Embassy in Kingston, Jamaica.
Thanks to her mother’s career, she has been quite the world traveler. She was born in Beijing and then lived in Surabaya, Indonesia, Jamaica and Guatemala before starting at least three years in Tunisia last summer. A few years back, she acquired a second husband and three more children, so now we have six grandchildren.
Tunisia is Pauline’s sixth overseas tour. She spent two years in Yaounde, Cameroon, before the children came along.
Virgile and his wife started about five years after Pauline, but they have done tours in Greece, Mexico and Paraguay before essentially settling stateside in Falls Church, Va.
They are my pride and joy. They and their lovely mother have showered me with love and happiness for nearly a quarter of a century.
And even though I did spend too much time at my computer, although not with porn, I guess I got away enough to do them some good.
At least I hope so.