The End of the Greatest Generation

Blumeh died yesterday: last of my Bubbie and Zaydie's best friends, last link to the Old Country, the last tenuous link to Bransk, last of the people who knew Bubbie and Zaydie before they were Morris and Eva Tucker and were Maishe and Chava Tikoczki. Last of 'The Greenies,' greenhorn Jews from the old shtetl speaking a language already dead who spent their lives trying to adapt the ways of a country they ill-understood while caught between the world of their children and grandchildren so entirely different from they and an old world completely destroyed.

Bransk was always a small town, population: 6000. Half of them Jews. Upon the war's end, 37 of them returned. Nearly all of them immigrated en masse, not just to Amerikeh, but to Baltimore, where my Bubbie had two much older sisters who'd already been in America since Bubbie was scarcely older than an infant. For more than fifty years thereafter: every Bar Mitzvah, every wedding, every shul honor, every bris and simchas bas, every funeral... Yiddish and broken English, constant fighting about whose children were more successful, constant complaining about physical ailments, constant fighting about who was doing better in business, endless food consumption and force-feeding of grandchildren, endless yelling at adult children in front of the other guests, endless recounting of life stories so that 've'd neveh fugget.'

My brothers are too young to have much memory of The Greenies and I wonder if The Greenies had much to do with any of my cousins' lives. But before Bubbie and Zaydie descended into dementia simultaneously, they babysat me at least once or twice a week and The Greenies often seemed like part of the furniture in their kitchen, and while I was raised as a little kid to speak Yiddish with my American relatives, their Yiddish - the real thing - was incomprehensible. Blumeh was the youngest, and her English was better than the rest, one of six languages she spoke and whose linguistic abilities she used to become one of the most sought after speakers to Maryland schools about the Holocaust. But all of them spoke English straight out of Mel Brooks in Robin Hood: Men in Tights or Eddie Murphy's barbershop Jew in Coming to America, but with much worse grammar - only Blumeh ever mastered the new language and none of them ever spoke it except 'mit a heccent.' When Bubbie would ask about school it was always 'Evohn! How you making out in school?' When my Zaydie was mad at me (often) he would always point his finger and shout 'Evohn! Don do dis!' When Dovid Gelbart would call my grandparents he would always introduce himself as 'Evan? Here's Dave Gelbart!' When Menukhke Shapiro wanted to talk she would always shouting interjectly over people 'VAITAMINIT'! When Jack Rubin would greet me he'd say 'Evan I gonna keess yoo.'

There were legions of stories about them all, some unprintably hilarious, some simply and obviously unprintable. Like so many low-class Europeans from the small towns, they were all a little bit meshuggeh: incredibly close but constantly fighting, constantly screaming, constantly banging their fists, sometimes not talking to each other for years at a time, making scenes, threatening to make scenes, ostentatiously refraining from making scenes, worried that others among them were about to make a scene, rescheduling events so that nobody would make a scene, going places they didn't want to go because if they didn't somebody would make a scene....

But they were self-evidently deposited into pressure cooker after pressure cooker until they were formed into the shape of their claustrophobic spaces: World War, followed by the Russian Civil War, followed by hyperinflation, followed by the Great Depression, followed by nationalist dictatorship, followed by Communist dictatorship, followed by the Holocuast and the Camps, followed by World War, followed by Soviet Invasion, followed by the Polish Civil War, followed by refugee camps, followed by immigration, and then landing in Amerikeh where they were supposed to be worry free... Learning the language, making a living, growing a business, selling a business, buying a bettah beezness, raising the kinder, buying a heus, paying deh mortgage, paying fah college, getting deh kinder stahted in beezness, helping deh kinder buy a heus, vatching di ayniklakh every Saturday night vhile the kinder vent ot to spend all deh money ve nevah had...

My mother always said there was no 'low gear' with Bubbie and Zaydie, and the Holocaust for them was roughly the same level of crisis as changing a lightbulb, but they were the last representatives of a whole world gone, a world unto itself completely destroyed, six million vanished into smoke and only a million left, the blood-brined remnants of a Jewish world once as populous or more than the Jews of the USA or Israel, and simultaneously among the final remnants of the founding generation of the Modern America.

Eric Hoffer once wrote: “It almost seems that nobody can hate America as much as native Americans (in his era simply meaning those born here). America needs new immigrants to love and cherish it.” It's difficult to believe that true anymore, though who knows ultimately. From generation to generation, people come to America because however difficult life is, they know it's better than life at home. But it is exceedingly difficult to love America in our era the way our grandparents did. The United States of America was not better then than it is now, but the whole world was so much worse, and at least the USA did a good enough job as the world's steward to enable 40 separate countries to grow into better places to live than our country has ever been.

Of the more than 531,000 Covid-19 deaths thus far, roughly 174,000 were in nursing homes and assisted living facilities. That's almost 1 in 3! On the one hand, it's not that tragic, these were mostly people who lived long and enormously productive lives whose lifespan far exceeded the actuarial tables of their life insurance. On the other hand, Covid is a horrible way to go, and think of their final year: utterly isolated with no visitors, not even their fellow residents or orderlies for company, the orderlies coming by their door three times a day to simply pass a meal tray through a slot. Many of them too demented to read a book or even follow a TV show, let alone set up a zoom link. Whatever their rate of decline, Covid vastly accelerated it, and whatever hope most of them had to go out with satisfaction ended. Nearly every person in America has a story of a parent or grandparent or some other elderly relative in a nursing home who lost whatever vestiges of marbles or physical health they had in 2019.

When we first realized the extent of Covid, nobody really knew how terrible or merciful it would be. For a moment it seemed as though everyone over the age of 65 might contract a potentially lethal case: not just the WWII vets and their riveter wives who worked in the wartime factories - singing along with Frankie and dancing with Duke, but Silent Generation suburbanites who wore flat-top ducks-asses for haircuts and falsie braziers while they were raised on Elvis and James Brown, along with early Boomer hippies whose young passions were folk music, protesting, and sex in public spaces. But unless they were particularly obese or asthmatic, Covid generally spared them too. For better or worse, the majority of the people finished off by Covid were in some ways on their last legs already. With them goes the entire Greatest Generation worldview, born into the chaos of a world torn asunder by War among countries who thought war between them impossible, raised in the frugality of the Great Depression, coming of age on Normandy Beach and Iwo Jima, and thereafter, even when blessed by the greatest financial circumstances ever bequeathed to a country in the entirety of human history, always playing it safe. Using their education on the GI bill for quiet lives in the suburbs: never standing out, never overspending, always working to bring their communities closer to their highly particular vision of what communities should be, and always suspicious of anyone who made too much political fuss and cultural noise, and therefore, viewing all of their successor generations with a kind of disgust.

Was it really the Greatest Generation? They certainly thought so... no generation is particularly great, but their record speaks for itself. However reluctantly, they helped get rid of Hitler then went toe to toe against the Soviet Union for the long haul without ending life on earth. Mass higher education for the victorious GIs, massive spending abroad to rebuild the defeated. They were the generation that desegregated schools, granted Civil Rights, and implemented the Great Society. If they backtracked in their latter years, they don't bare all of the blame. For all their demands for progressive political change, all those SDS Boomers did was scare their elders into Nixon and Reagan while making sure their own taxes were slashed as former socialists amassed huge stock portfolios and ostentatious houses in the exurbs because the simple half-acre on which the GG raised them was never enough for Boomer ambition. And for all the wokeness of internet millennials, all they've done so far was to scare their elders into Donald Trump, and while the internet generation goes after language vagaries and misbehaving celebrities, the world melts, and burns, and comes under surveillance, and while refugees amass by the millions they focus all their attention on leveling a playing field already weighted to favor them over more than 95% of the world population. The high of self-righteousness is so much higher when focused on problems for which the stakes are so low.

It's not like the Greatest Generation put together the infrastructure of a more functional world out of any great passion for granting justice to the underprivileged, but they did it, and did it because they saw how easily the world came undone without the stability of well-regulated governments that care.

And as the Greatest Generation passes, so too does living memory of the equation that granted the world greater success than any era the world ever yet saw and may yet see for a long while: rock-ribbed, Rooseveltian liberalism. A welfare state in which accumulating disproportionate wealth is a thing to be taxed for, and a governmental rate of expenditure which assists in granting opportunity for all who want and need it. Opportunies through volunteering for a corps of National Service. Medical care for the poor and sick, financial care for the poor who don't want to be poor - which is 99% of them. Cities that are as tough on crime's causes as crime itself, astronomically higher education funding, employment agencies, day care, executive assistance for the disabled, financial assistance for large families. A whole civic sector to serve as a check alongside the private and public sectors, whose entire function is to be a regulative watchdog of both government and business - well-funded and regulated newspapers, civic organizations, volunteer associations, and yes... robust charity foundations. A United States of America that is not great by virtue of being itself, but by virtue of how our country struggles from generation to generation to be better than it's been. Granting more rights, granting more opportunities, granting more freedom - freedom of worship, freedom of speech, freedom from want, freedom from fear, freedom to assemble, freedom to publish the truth, freedom to self-identify, and freedom to love.

But...

Not just liberalism at home, but liberalism abroad, preventatively assisting other countries so that their problems do not become our problems and the world's Hitlers are stopped before they have a chance to become Hitler. Liberals hate the idea of pre-emptive military action, conservatives hate the idea of preventative care, but the necessity of one is the same as the other. There is an obvious reason that America's enactment of liberalism stopped at exactly the same time when we withdrew from commitments abroad out of worry that we'd create a Vietnam or imperial dictatorship from every nation building exercise and every attempt to keep the peace and stop genocide. Without one, there is no other, because the problems of the world so easily become exhaustingly great as refugees amass and necessarily deplete resources of new countries after mismanagement depleted the resources of their old countries. So many immigrants should never have had to immigrate at all, and only did because nobody looked out for them until after they became the underprivileged of some other country. If the 21st century has any lesson thus far, it's that the world can only solve so many world-ending problems at once, and therefore some problems can only be solved before they happen. There has to be enormous treasuries of stipulated foreign aid to solve countries' problems before they become uninhabitable, there has to be a league of liberal democracies (like NATO but expanded) establishing peacekeeping troops throughout the world, enforcing treaties on environmental regulation and weapons testing with severe disincentives for those who violate them, and occasionally, yes, outright wars abroad and longterm military commitments that may sometimes seem like quagmires, and sometimes... even supporting regimes distasteful in the extreme, so long as we deliver financial and legal incentives to reform their behavior.

Just as today seems to be, the world for a lifetime before the Greatest Generation was besotted by impossible positivist dreams of ideologies that would transform the world into a place better than the world can ever be. The world's dark side always chokes us just as powerfully as the world's light lets us breathe, and the dark is somehow able to conceal itself within the very light which would appear the absence of darkness. It was idealism as much as corruption which allowed the flourish of imperialism, fascism, and communism. Corruption knows what's right and does wrong, but idealism can do wrong and convince itself it's right. For decades, idealists of all stripes turned a blind eye for decades to all the weaknesses of ideologies with no track record of improvement and ever worsening conditions.

Social democracy without capitalism is no democracy. Liberty without welfare is a self-contradiction. A welfare system at home will bankrupt itself without a similar welfare system abroad. The world of the Greatest Generation was not better than ours, but if the world is now better, it's mostly their achievement.

A generation like the Greatest Generation is exceedingly rare because the baseline of existence is not order but chaos, and the Greatest Generation was not the greatest because they were morally better than us in any way at all, they were the greatest because they lived their lives by a formula of order that improved things.

This is the generation that The Greenies live on, a generation that let Bubbie and Zaydie build the future for his children and grandchildren which untold millions of Jews never had, a generation that gave my family and a billion other families everything that nowhere else in the world ever has or ever would. After Covid, they're almost all gone, and it will be a terribly long wait for a generation well-chastened enough to replace them.