Frank Kaiser: Silent Generation Finally Speaks Out!

As I look over our CORE membership I see a membership from active educators in their thirties, forties, and early fifties. I also see senior membership composed of members in their seventies, eighties, and a few in their nineties..... many of whom are computer savvy and aren't afraid to speak up! The rest of us.... well, we're somewhere in our mid to late fifties and early sixties -- retired but too young for Medicare.

Frank Kaiser, prolific writer, political pundit, and editor of Suddenly Senior (www.suddenlysenior.com) addresses those of our membership who are in our "Senior Division" and who are definitely not like their counterparts who were aptly termed the "Silent Generation." These important CORE contributors were educating Ohio students when Dr. Leone was still in diapers! These members are anything but "silent and boring." Thank God they are among our membership and are keeping the heat on those who are steering our STRS ship. One has to get up quite early to pull the wool over their eyes! We are lucky...very lucky to have them in our flock. John Curry

SILENT GENERATION FINALLY SPEAKS OUT!
By Frank Kaiser

I’m a member of the Silent Generation. A charter member, really, so dubbed by Tom Watson, Jr., then-president of IBM, when he admonished my DePauw University graduating class of 1957 to “speak out, take chances, and be daring.”

Life Magazine picked up Watson’s sobriquet and, because it was so right on, the term stuck.*

Today 49 million of us — born too young to have struggled through the Depression or fight in World War II, and too old to ally ourselves with the free-spirited ‘60s — are sandwiched between the much larger GI “Greatest” Generation (63 million) and the Boomers (79 million).

We Silents were considered bush-league. Politicians and advertisers trivialized us like some cosmic flatulence that loomed when no one was looking. Our war was Korea. Who’s heard of that? Our generation didn’t even rate a US president.

Though you couldn’t prove it by me, we are credited with starting the sexual revolution. (In the 1960s, anthropologists say, it simply became publicly respectable to talk about it.) We’re also the folks who brought the world incomparable national wealth and unimaginable progress in technology and science.

We even produced a few activists — Gloria Steinem, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Betty Friedan, and Ralph Nader come to mind.

But most of us went directly from school to risk-averse work and marriage without ever waking our human spirit and inviting it out to play.

Safe. Silent. And boring.

Conformity was success. Author William Manchester observed that we were “withdrawn, cautious, unimaginative, indifferent, unadventurous and silent.” Even as teens, few of us ever rebelled, a common rite of passage for other generations.

In part, it was economic fear. The taste of financial hardship still lingered from our childhoods. (To this day, I won’t eat tongue, our family’s only meat dish for years.)

Postwar prosperity promised economic security. Those of us lucky enough to get jobs with Ma Bell, Sears, IBM, and other enlightened employers of the era buried our fear under profit sharing, lifelong job security, fair annual raises, and retirement plans. All they asked in return was not to rock the boat.

And part was political fear.

The assault on America‘s political liberty by the witch-hunting House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) in tandem with Senator Joseph McCarthy‘s unscrupulous inquisitions scared the hell out of us. McCarthy whipped up anti-communist sentiment to such fervor that it was dangerous to express an opinion anywhere about anything.

Fearing future retribution, I chose not to join a college political club. Who knew? People were going to jail for beliefs and affiliations held 20 or 30 years earlier. Free speech appeared doomed. And many of our elders, including would-be employers, considered the junior senator from Wisconsin a hero of the century.

We became apolitical. Safe. Silent. And boring.

But life was good. We were Organization Men in our Grey Flannel Suits. We did as asked, show up on time, and never questioned authority. It was all so easy. Our mothers had taught us well.

Now, as we hit our 70s and beyond, many of us Silents are panicking.

We were going along, and getting along, doing that which was expected, when BAM! Lightening-like, we realized that we only go around once and we’d better start living life on our own terms.

Today, in our autumn, we are following our bliss. At last!

Redefining retirement, a judge I know is now handcrafting beautiful wooden chests. An ad guy I worked with treks the world, paying his way with the occasional travel article. Another sails the globe. Alone. Yet another, now in her mid 60s, is in medical school.

We’ve finally reached the teenage rebellion stage!

1935: Just One Great Year

We Silents have been extraordinarily fortunate. Arguably, we’ve lived in the world’s most fascinating era. The year I was born, 1935 brought us Elvis, Woody Allen, Mikhail Gorbachev, the Dalai Lama, Social Security, Alcoholics Anonymous, and the DC-3, perhaps the most noteworthy and enduring aircraft ever built.

That’s just one year.

We’ve survived more changes than the earth normally sees in millennia. Don’t believe it? Try explaining to a 20-something what life was like in the pre-TV 1950s.

Today we dare to be truly alive, to reach for our potential and grasp a world of realization and fulfillment, of spirituality and serenity that we never knew possible. And all on our own terms.

This may be our generation’s greatest achievement.