What Goethe has to say about Boomers and Millenials

A great thing about digital readers such as Kindle is that one can download all manner of older works for free or a very small fee.  So, I recently downloaded a work by Goethe:  Autobiography:  Truth and Fiction Relating to My Life.  Below is a clipping of interest.

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Autobiography: Truth and Fiction Relating to My Life (Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe)
- Highlight Loc. 484-87 | Added on Saturday, October 18, 2014, 05:14 AM 

But for this is required what is scarcely attainable; namely, that the individual should know himself and his age,—himself, so far as he has remained the same under all circumstances; his age, as that which carries along with it, determines and fashions, both the willing and the unwilling: so that one may venture to pronounce, that any person born ten years earlier or later would have been quite a different being, both as regards his own culture and his influence on others. 

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Amazingly, this insight by Goethe several centuries ago comports with one of the most fascinating and pertinent things I ever learned.  Back in the mid-eighties when I was in my mid-thirties, at work they showed a number of videos by Morris Massey with the title of something like:  You Are What You Were When.  The main thesis is that a young person, any young person, is programmed at the gut level by the age of ten.  The way that life is when one is ten years old is how one thinks life has always been and how it should be.   Massey said that in the twentieth century generally people in successive approximately ten year groupings had the same views.  Little did I know that Goethe had the same observation about the fashions of one's time and ten year cycles. People who came of age ten during the Depression had one set of views.  The In-Between generation coming of age in the forties had another.  Then the boomers another set of views about how life should be.  He gave us pointers on what the differences were but stopped there and later generations like Gen X and the Millenials were not covered.  Massey's goal was in helping the various generations in large companies better understand each other and work together by promoting understanding of how each group sees the world, what they expect from work, and how to work better together.  While I was growing up there were several things that I could not understand.  One thing that amazed me was the fear and loathing about hair length.  I was thirteen when the Beatles arrived and in concert with my cohort I thought the music and their hair were great.  Why did the older crowd get so upset at that?    I recall James Michenor saying in a Reader's Digest article that some people in Kent, Ohio thought that people who went barefooted deserved to be shot.  That is what we Boomers experienced. Now no one seems to care that much.  In fact I've heard that nowadays long hair is favored by people who are conservative.  Whether or not that is true, younger folks have no idea the consternation that long hair caused in the sixties.  When I went to my very conservative Christian college and walked into the library, I saw pictures of 19th century heroes like James Harding for whom the school was named.  He had a beard despite the fact that his namesake school banned beards.  And  their were others with long hair as well as a beard.  If it was ok for Presidents and Civil War Generals to have long hair why was it not OK for us? Well, Massey explains the origin of this.  Technology around the turn of the century provided better razors.  Then, our soldiers discovered by spending weeks in the trenches of World War 1 the advantage of having their hair shorn very short.  It made a lot of sense in that situation.  Good for them.  Morris said that when the WW1 soldiers returned from Europe, they were looked up to and admired.  Short hair became the norm and short hair became part of how one was supposed to be and going against that was rebellion against God and Country and a rejection of all that is good.

This has been one of the main lenses through which I have viewed the Liberal / Conservative divide.  When in the early nineties Rush Limbaugh came out with his book "The Way Things Ought To Be" I couldn't help but think of what I'd learned from Morris Massey.  Amazingly, both Massey and Goethe agree that one should be aware of the forces of society and the fashions of ones age and how they exert a formative influence on a person that one should be aware of it.  I hope I've been conscious of this through my life and constantly seeking to correct past errors and not holding too long onto my views that lack substantiation.  Sure would be nice if I could rely on gut level programming and tradition.  That would make things easier I sometimes think.  But I try not to.

Goethe says it is scarcely attainable.  But I'm glad he has redirected me at that goal.

Recalling my Birth and First Three Years

My first memory is of complete and absolute bliss.  I perceive a warm bluish light, an orb which vibrates with an assuring comfortable hum.  I'm grasping for words to properly express this.  I have some sense that I feel I'm in the presence of and with God.

Then later there is discomfort.  Something is not right.  I'm experiencing a change and I want to go back to how it was.  This lasts for a while.  I want to go back to God.  Finally, I'm out and I'm in the light of the external world.  I feel that I'm smiling and thinking "Here I Am".   Of course I did't know English but that is the translation of the feeling that I had. 

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One Sunday in the 1980's we were having our Sunday dinner at my parents home.  The subject of trains was being discussed.  I turned to my Mom who was sitting next to me.  I said to her that I recall climbing onto a train with her when I was very little.  Her jaw dropped and she said that one train ride was when I was about 19 months old.  It was late June 1952.  We were living in Comanche, Oklahoma at the time and she was pregnant with my brother.  Dad, a minister, had six weeks of Gospel Meetings (Revivals) lined up and would be out of town continuously.  Mom and I rode the train on our way to Pontiac, MI. where she could stay with her Mom and have the baby.  Also, I remember that as we walked down the aisle, there was a high pitched sound that I heard and by which I was puzzled.  I thought of it as a man singing hi and somehow injured or altered.  The closest thing I have ever heard since then has been the opening notes of a song called "Cattle Call".  The song was originally due to Tex Owen's in the thirties but sung by many since.   I don't know if this song was what was playing or if it was just some high pitched sound due to equipment and machinery.  Here is a link to the song as performed by Eddy Arnold.  The opening "ou ou" is what I remember. 

Several months later, we begin to drive back to Oklahoma from Michigan.  We stop at a restaurant and the waitress pays a lot of attention to me as the new big brother.  Everyone was very kind to me.  As we leave I'm encouraged to pick out some candy.  I don't know what anything is and I don't know what to choose.  I feel pressure to make a decision.  The waitress points to something and I nod that it is what I want.  But I really did not.  It was one of those round, pinkish peanut brittle type things.  

I was barely two when Christmas comes.  We went to Pocahontas, AR for that.  It is where my Dad and I were born.  We stay with his parents.  Aunt Edna dresses up light Santa Claus and enters the front door.  The Christmas tree is in the room that would later be cousin Dennis' room.  

Some time later, probably in the summer.  We are back in that house and Dennis and I are running and jumping onto a bed which is next to a window.  At one point I jump onto the bed and turn a flip and hit my head on the window sill.  I bleed.  My parents take me to Doctor.  It is night time and I recall a white house.  I suppose I still have the scar.  

We live across the street from a lumber mill.  I can still hear the high pitched whining of the saws that were on incessantly.  Mom has a red plastic radio she listens to.  I look through the window and see kids playing between our house and the next.  When they go inside I go out and find they have left a catcher's mask lying on the ground.  I know that it goes on the face and try to put it on but I could not figure out how to do that.   The inside of our church has wood paneling.  I want to say knotty pine but not sure of that detail.  Kind of darker.  

About two months before my 3rd birthday, we prepare to move to Velma, OK.  The moving van comes to the house and begin to move the household items.  I am worried they will not take my little rocking chair.  I take it and place it on the back of the moving truck and rock back and forth.

On my third birthday my Mom tries to teach me how to say "three" but it is so much easier to say "free".  I recall at church tapping someone from behind and looking up I put up three fingers and say I'm "free".