Gail's Blog

So now it is our fault that so much gas has been consumed, and that we will cost the country so much in Social Security. That we paid into Social Security all these years, and that our parents embraced consumption, and schooled us in it, are not relevant. We tried. Ours was the first Earth Day (the year I graduated high school).We marched against the Vietnam War. Many of our brothers, cousins, friends died in that war--the last generation to be drafted. We rebelled and revolted against our parents' Mad Men values. Yet we are being pilloried in the press and on the web as being greedy, selfish, youth-smitten black holes of consumerism. How did this happen? Why was my parents' generation the "Greatest", when we were also drafted, and also threatened by the world's madness?  I know. They suffered the Depression (mom still saved foil, and I did, also, when newly married). They were terrified of being conquered by the terrible despots of the time. We fear

Mom as a child. My Mother had a secret war. She didn't take it to the streets, or join with others to wage it. In her heart she held beliefs that were mightily opposed to the popular opinion of her time. She taught me that African Americans were not N****s, as the neighbors said. They were "colored people, or Negroes". They were people like us. But she taught these things quietly, as if fearing someone would overhear. The most powerful, long-lasting oppression she held within her was the oppression of Anti-Semitism . She falsified her applications for work after she quit high school because they asked for her religion. She wrote, "Protestant", instead.  In one of her first jobs she was routinely called the "Jew Girl" . This she wanted to avoid in the future. When I was small, she counseled me to never tell anyone I was half Jewish. We lived in a second-generation Roman Catholic neighborhood in Willowick, Ohio. I told, anyway. I thought, if