This weekend, at the age of 86, my grandfather climbed a ladder to the top of his two story house to clean his gutters. On his descent down the ladder after finishing up, he stumbled on the second to last step plummeting to the ground, which knocked him unconscious. My grandmother rushed him to the hospital where he awoke a half an hour later surrounded by doctors, hooked up to an IV, with a baseball size lump around 2 inches above his left eyebrow. To our surprise, he wasn't angry or upset at the fact that he fell or that he was in the hospital at the age of 87. He was only upset at my grandmother for taking him to the hospital in the first place.
When my mother first told me this story, I initially was concerned for the well-being of my grandpa, but after I heard he was okay all I could think about was why he would react like that. I came to the conclusion that it's a generational thing. Being a part of the WW2 generation which Tom Brokaw said to be, “The Greatest Generation", my grandpa is frankly cut from a different cloth than we are. He was raised to be a man responsible for himself, and to never have someone else take care of him. A brand of toughness that is rare to find today, that I myself can honestly say that I don't possess. At the age of 18 I was submitting my college applications while falling under an illness today known as “senioritis." Meanwhile, my grandfather was enlisting in the army and promptly being sent to the middle of Europe to fight for the allies.
Another trend I see dividing our generation with my grandfather's, is the fact that he lived a much simpler life. When everyone today is obsessed with finding themselves and always looking for more to do, the man of my grandfather's generation didn't obsess over anything. They just lived simply and tried to be happy. The so called “Greatest Generation" also didn't expect anything to just fall in their laps. They embraced challenge and earned what they desired with old fashioned hard work. It wasn't just the fact that they worked hard however, but that they experienced gratitude from the work they put in.
That generation also doesn't find the need to air their accomplishments with the public. Whether it stems from the war and not wanting to discuss the things they saw, or the fact that they believed that they had just performed their duties as men, and had nothing to brag about, the men of this era truly kept to themselves.
I love our generation, don't get me wrong. We make up the America that I grew up in and the culture that I've learned to adapt to and love. Yet we do have our faults and I truly believe that if we took some notes on previous generations that we could evolve, grow, and become more than we set out to be.
