NEW EXPECTATIONS? HOPE ISN’T ENOUGH?

Who says we need new expectations?

Every baby boomer on the planet, if they’ve got any awareness.

Who else?

Every millennial on the planet. They don’t get off so easy.

First the old people:

The big part of expectations, if we’re being honest here, new or old, is living with the reality that we’re not really up to it.

Do we want a ‘good life’ or ‘good enough.’

Keep in mind one person’s ‘good enough’ is another’s great.

If your parents were raised with an outhouse, indoor plumbing is part of a great life.

(Quick aside: If you find yourself in an outhouse, lift the lid and let it slam down before you sit on it. Why?

Because there might be a big, hairy, spider under there waiting to crawl on you. Ask me how I know.)

What were boomers’ old expectations? I don’t think I’m far off here, but didn’t we just want to be better than our parents?

If you grew up with angry parents, people who seemed angry with each other first then the rest of the world, it might be because they followed church advice, or parental advice:

No sex until you’re married.

(Quick aside II: Masturbation was viewed as a dangerous sin that could result in:

• blindness
• hairy palms
• impotence later in life
• erectile dysfunction
• penis shrinkage
• penis curvature
• low sperm count
• infertility
• mental illness
• physical weakness

Or not.

2

The Greatest Generation came back from Europe with stories and experiences with hot women in desperate times.

Peggy Sue and Linda Lew were hot women without the desperation and straightened out their boys’ wild ideas out on how to Do It.

First, put a ring on it, or lose it.

What it really feels like to miss me
Cause if you liked it then you should have put a ring on it
If you liked it then you shoulda put a ring on it
Don’t be mad once you see that he want it
If you liked it then you shoulda put a ring on it

More than one family grew up in weird tension.

What did baby boomers far and wide do when they left the house?

They shacked up.

That’s what living together outside the bonds of holy matrimony is called.

New Expectations For Shacking Up?

I had a roommate growing up, then a dorm roommate, an apartment roommate, house roommates.

Shacking up is different due to expectations.

Did boomer hippies discuss it? Did they break down the labor of daily life, or did the women turn into their stoner dude’s mommy?

Add laundry, doing dishes, and general house cleaning to the groovy time after work, or class.

And they wonder where the romance went?

Prior generations followed the Get Married First rule and lived a harder life.

When things got too tense, they had a baby to make things all better.

Then another and another, and what do you know, a few more. That’s a lot of tension.

The Pill, Roe v Wade, and better mechanical birth control devices, allowed boomers to bang it out without overcrowding the planet.

We know how that worked out now that millennials have overtaken boomers as the biggest generation in the history of generations.

It was supposed to be a commune, not mink farm.

Cultural Expectations For An Outsider

From boomerpdx:

I knew a guy from work. We were on the 7th floor of One Battery Park Plaza in the After Settlement Day group for E. F. Hutton.

He was a big Italian guy my age who spoke the language.

We used to get lunch on the third floor with the panoramic view of Hudson Bay and the Statue of Liberty just sitting out there. To regulars it was an everyday thing. To me it was an amazing sight.

I was also the guy who thought of the subways as carnival rides for context.

Another group in the huge lunch room / cafeteria also spoke Italian.

Five young women gathered in gowns at the same table looking like extras from a Hollywood prom musical.

They were made up, dressed up, and would have been a good match for any models on the cover of Vogue.

My pal abandoned me and started sitting with them and talking Italian and laughing it up for a good time.

2

A week later one of the girls came over to my table. We hit it off. Took a walk across the street to Battery Park through the Navy Memorial.

After that my buddy told me to turn it down. 

“These beautiful girls are here to find a rich husband, not us. Their families support them and they live at home until they get married. Doing anything else would brand them whores in their brothers’, fathers’, uncles’ and nonno’s eyes.

“Those are also the people who will come after you if they think you’re doing something wrong.”

Then he invited me out to Queens to meet his family. They lived in a building with a single man apartment, newly wed apartment, first kid, second kid, then the empty nest apartment, and back to the single person apartment. 

And they were all occupied, the circle of married life in full swing.

“This is why we never leave the city, and you won’t either if you start dating Sophia.”

Great Expectations For Millennials Coming Up

Through the bold leadership of their elders, millennials have a chance for a good life.

They’ll need to pay attention to changing times, changing mores, and learn to adapt.

Fortunately for them, we still have a prophet among us.

Come gather ’round people
Wherever you roam
And admit that the waters
Around you have grown
And accept it that soon
You’ll be drenched to the bone

Come mothers and fathers
Throughout the land
And don’t criticize
What you can’t understand
Your sons and your daughters
Are beyond your command
Your old road is rapidly agin’
Please get out of the new one
If you can’t lend your hand
For the times they are a-changin’

2

The times they are a- changin’?

As we age up, we get it. The times are changing constantly, not always not always for the better.

But, across the board, we all want the same thing: A Good Life. Is that too much to ask, to great an expectation?

What would Charles Dickens do?

Great Expectations is full of extreme imagery — poverty, prison ships and chains, and fights to the death — and has a colourful cast of characters who have entered popular culture. These include the eccentric Miss Havisham, the beautiful but cold Estella, and Joe Gargery, the unsophisticated and kind blacksmith. Dickens’s themes include wealth and poverty, love and rejection, and the eventual triumph of good over evil. 

Chuck’s themes are all of our themes. Rich or poor, loved or not, hope is penultimate power.

With hope we eventually triumph over our problems.

Not Dark Yet by Bob Dylan, his newest song featured on his website, takes a shot.

It’s not dark yet, but it’s getting there.

I’m not feeling it, but when I look around I can see it getting dark sooner than later in some people.

(Last aside: If you’ve read Great Expectations, leave a comment on how it applies to modern lives young and old. I haven’t read it yet and I’m looking for a book.)

And lighten up while you still can.