Do Civics get anything good in the cycle?

[pbrower2a]

(07-12-2019, 07:49 PM)Hintergrund Wrote:

(06-14-2019, 01:02 PM)Tim Randal Walker Wrote: Didn't many of the Lost die before the Boom Awakening really got going?

Perhaps the first few Awakening years weren't so bad for retired Lost.  It has been noted that the Civic Order begins to decline in late 2T.

If the lost had lived on longer, maybe the 2T would have started later... or had trouble.

(06-29-2019, 11:41 PM)Warren Dew Wrote:

(05-30-2019, 09:35 AM)AspieMillennial Wrote: It seems like they get all of the bad. Is there any good side that extends to our lives, not the life of some hypothetical children in the future?

Civics get coddled and spoon fed as children and youth.  That's what causes them to be so entitled for the rest of their lives, because they think being coddled is the normal state of life. Contrast this with reactives, who get neglected in their childhood and youth.

Quote:pbrower [?]

GIs pushed critical thinking upon Boom kids, and it worked to keep most of them from becoming narcissistic fascists 

It wasn't the GIs who pushed critical thinking on Boom kids, since the GIs, as Civics, were ultimate conformists that considered critical thinking dangerously radical.  It was the Silents that taught Boomers to think for themselves, and for some of them, that thinking ended up being critical thinking.

S&H explicitly say that the GIs thought that they had been too conformist in retrospect, so they encouraged their kids. The Silents definitely did, of course.

And you description "Civics get coddled and spoon fed as children and youth." rather fits the Boomers.

Civic generations do not get coddled. They get directed. If I had to choose whether I got good and credible direction or got every material delight and great ease as a child, I would take the hardscrabble reality that the GI Generation largely knew (and I can tell you about how rough GI childhood could be in material reality -- every subsequent generation has had things far easier) in return for firm and principled direction. I am going to go further along that line in another post.

The technological world that the GI generation offered few indulgences to most youth. There were phonographs and radios, but those were pricey. Of course a phonograph was expensive enough, but the records for them were themselves costly, too. The GI Generation created the essence of the technology that we would find tolerable today -- the polio vaccine, television, expressways, collapsible steering columns, transistors, mainframe computers, high-fidelity stereo with LP records, cheap paperback books, TV dinners (predecessors of our microwave meals), air travel, and air conditioning. I could name more.

GI workers formed the most effective and pervasive unions that America ever knew... and those unions helped GI adults get what were truly living wages in the 1930s. That is right - the 1930s. As soldiers, the GIs were the optimal soldiers, sailors, and airmen for winning the one war that America absolutely, positively had to win if America was to survive as the Shining City on the Hill. Such GI stars in baseball alone, mostly GI, did something other than hit home runs or throw strikeouts  at some time during WWII:

Luke Appling United States Army

Al Barlick United States Coast Guard

Yogi Berra United States Navy

Willard Brown United States Army

Nestor Chylak United States Army

Mickey Cochrane United States Navy

Leon Day United States Army

Bill Dickey United States Navy

Joe DiMaggio United States Army

Larry Doby United States Navy

Bobby Doerr United States Army

Bob Feller United States Navy

Charlie Gehringer United States Navy

Joe Gordon United States Army

Hank Greenberg United States Army

Billy Herman United States Navy

Monte Irvin United States Army

Ralph Kiner United States Navy

Bob Lemon United States Navy

Ted Lyons United States Marines

Larry MacPhail United States Army

Lee MacPhail United States Navy

Johnny Mize United States Navy

Stan Musial United States Navy

Pee Wee Reese United States Navy

Phil Rizzuto United States Navy

Robin Roberts United States Army

Jackie Robinson United States Army

Red Ruffing United States Army

Red Schoendienst United States Army

Enos Slaughter United States Army

Duke Snider United States Navy

Warren Spahn United States Army

Bill Veeck United States Marines

Ted Williams United States Marines

Early Wynn United States Army

Baseball Hall of Fame, only -- and some of these cut significant parts of lucrative careers out.

If GIs seem coddled with the GI Bill -- they earned it in such places as Guadalcanal and Bastogne. GI scriptwriters, actors, and directors played their role in creating some of the finest cinema -- most of it still eminently watchable -- in the marvelous cinematic years just before America got involved in WWII. GIs established the entertainment part of television and made it squeaky-clean and safe for about twenty years.


OK, so what of the Civil Rights Movement? GI adults got their role and handled it well. GI blacks may have been ahead of GI whites in struggling for it, but GI whites generally made the right choices. Don't underestimate the roles of Rosa Parks and Thurgood Marshall. Maybe GI soldiers who had faced much the same ideology that the KKK offered among the Axis enemy in WWII could decide that the segregationist cause was simply wrong.

Maybe a generation that knew how rough American life could be, especially if it lacked WASP privilege, would endeavor to make a better world. The generations that saw the completed project but not the process could take it for granted.