Mix together conservationists and environmentalists if you must and if you can : but first, please, take the baby steps of mixing together oil and water or chalk and cheese or matter and anti-matter.
Because Rene Descartes' biggest duality was opposing Man and Mother Nature - a motif adopted without reservation by the Conservation Movement in its unstinting efforts to keep bits of the 'unspoiled' natural world away from the 'destructive' human world.
But that was all bright & shiny prewar, Modernity, stuff.
Because in our dark and murky, postwar, Postmodern, world we quickly realized that human-made fallout clouds dropped their poison over Big City and Nature Conservatory indiscriminately - no 1950s style 'separate but equal' nonsense here .
Bread or Bombs : all was (unwilling) open commensality now, on lifeboat earth ....
Showing posts with label postwar. Show all posts
Showing posts with label postwar. Show all posts
Tuesday, April 14, 2015
Friday, February 13, 2015
Four years difference really matter : when you're four and eight
On August 15th 1945, the two children (ages four and eight) of a young American serviceman in the Pacific preparing to invade Japan probably responded quite differently from the united way their two grandmothers (aged 59 and 63) reacted to the news that the atomic destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki had caused the Japanese to sue for peace.
The two grandmothers were both united in giving comparatively little thought to all the grandmothers and grandchildren killed at Hiroshima and Nagasaki , so glad were they that their son/son-in-law wasn't going to be killed during the Allied invasion effort.
The eight year old child agreed - very glad that Daddy wasn't going to die overseas and would be coming home soon unharmed.
But the four year old child probably hadn't even been told that Daddy was facing imminent death overseas or that two bombs that killed thousands of children would now bring Daddy home safe.
This child's reaction was no reaction.
Because when you are very young, even only being four years apart in age makes a huge difference - though four years difference means nothing when you are two grandparents nearing retirement.
Flash forward to the Spring of 1956 and the news that deadly nuclear fallout from an American Bravo Castle Test of an hydrogen bomb had gone around the world in the atmosphere strong enough to kill a Japanese fisherman thousands of miles from the test site.
The grandmothers are now in their seventies and the eight year old is now 19 and drafted into the Army.
Their fear over American nuclear fallout worries and their regret for the loss of a human life is undoubtedly tempered by the thought that the American A-Bombs had saved thousands of American lives and that the wartime Japanese had been particularly cruel to other ethnicities on many well documented occasions.
By contrast, the four year old is now 15 and this child is distinctly uncomfortable with possible death or genetic damage from fallout radiation - possibly because of her viewing of many youth-oriented movies on the subject.
The child knows - from schoolbooks - that the A-Bombs killed hundreds of thousands but also shortened the war , saving the lives of starving millions in Japan and in her overseas occupied territories, as well as tens of thousands of American servicemen.
But that child doesn't feel it - in her bones - as her older brother does.
She, being four, wasn't literally there, at the time on the dropping of the Bomb.
In body yes - but not in heart, mind and soul.
Four years difference among the young really matter --- this is the starting thesis of this blog.
My postwar transitional generation, by definition a little too young to remember WWII first hand, only learned of WWII (and how supposedly Big Science won the war) second hand, learned it in the mind but not experienced it in the heart.
During its key plastic formative years, my generation held both this second hand kernel of support for prewar modernity's Big Science and first hand support for the beginnings of post-modern/postwar human rights protests of the Sixties.
The key characteristic of this transitional generation was not Sixties street conflict but internal mental conflict - knowing both modernity and postmodernity but not being totally in either camp, unlike their parents or children...
The two grandmothers were both united in giving comparatively little thought to all the grandmothers and grandchildren killed at Hiroshima and Nagasaki , so glad were they that their son/son-in-law wasn't going to be killed during the Allied invasion effort.
The eight year old child agreed - very glad that Daddy wasn't going to die overseas and would be coming home soon unharmed.
But the four year old child probably hadn't even been told that Daddy was facing imminent death overseas or that two bombs that killed thousands of children would now bring Daddy home safe.
This child's reaction was no reaction.
Because when you are very young, even only being four years apart in age makes a huge difference - though four years difference means nothing when you are two grandparents nearing retirement.
Flash forward to the Spring of 1956 and the news that deadly nuclear fallout from an American Bravo Castle Test of an hydrogen bomb had gone around the world in the atmosphere strong enough to kill a Japanese fisherman thousands of miles from the test site.
The grandmothers are now in their seventies and the eight year old is now 19 and drafted into the Army.
Their fear over American nuclear fallout worries and their regret for the loss of a human life is undoubtedly tempered by the thought that the American A-Bombs had saved thousands of American lives and that the wartime Japanese had been particularly cruel to other ethnicities on many well documented occasions.
By contrast, the four year old is now 15 and this child is distinctly uncomfortable with possible death or genetic damage from fallout radiation - possibly because of her viewing of many youth-oriented movies on the subject.
The child knows - from schoolbooks - that the A-Bombs killed hundreds of thousands but also shortened the war , saving the lives of starving millions in Japan and in her overseas occupied territories, as well as tens of thousands of American servicemen.
But that child doesn't feel it - in her bones - as her older brother does.
She, being four, wasn't literally there, at the time on the dropping of the Bomb.
In body yes - but not in heart, mind and soul.
Four years difference among the young really matter --- this is the starting thesis of this blog.
My postwar transitional generation, by definition a little too young to remember WWII first hand, only learned of WWII (and how supposedly Big Science won the war) second hand, learned it in the mind but not experienced it in the heart.
During its key plastic formative years, my generation held both this second hand kernel of support for prewar modernity's Big Science and first hand support for the beginnings of post-modern/postwar human rights protests of the Sixties.
The key characteristic of this transitional generation was not Sixties street conflict but internal mental conflict - knowing both modernity and postmodernity but not being totally in either camp, unlike their parents or children...
Thursday, February 12, 2015
Writin' 'bout my generation - This is my generation baby !
Janus Manhattan's Children : writin' 'bout my generation baby !
Truth be told, I don't actually know when my generation , the postwar's first (transitional) generation of children, really ended.
That is because I define this key transitional generation as those too young to remember WWII as WWII but old enough to remember the rebellious 'turn to postmodernity' of the late sixties first hand - so around 1961 should marks its ending.
( I really should love this definition - it places me, born in 1951, conveniently plunk (Janus-like) in the middle of this generation !)
But, as a writer, my difficulty revolves around this question : is some vague personal memory of 1950s (modernity-oriented) public schooling also required as well ?
Many people think it so.
Many people think it so.
If so, my generation runs from 1941 to around 1956.
Now in Canada, for example, the Baby Boom began in 1941 and ended in 1966 .
However, I feel we must re-define this transitional generation away from the question of whether its members were baby boom members or not .
We should focus instead on a worldwide set of kids who grew up within my original definition --- even in countries that experienced no visible baby boom.
That is those kids who were old enough to feel the postwar glow of WWII scientism second hand, but also young enough to share the 'rock 'n' roll' rebellion of the mid to late 1960s.
Even if that only meant wildly dancing, as elementary school kids, to a noisy Rolling Stone record because they knew their parents clearly disapproved ....
Even if that only meant wildly dancing, as elementary school kids, to a noisy Rolling Stone record because they knew their parents clearly disapproved ....
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