Continuity of the Generations and Family Cohesion

When you hear the “old folks” reminiscing away themselves, what does this talk mean to you? When your grandparents tell you “In my day, we…,” how much of it has any relevance to you? 

The details of the old house, the winning and losing of byegone ball games or elections or loves, shared memories of marbles or hula-hoop or policemen, to each new and “thoroughly modern” generation, anything an elder can tell you is something belonging to them and their time, and as such not of much relevance to you and your time. 

Kids “rebel” against their parents, avoid being like them to the extent they are able, maybe humor them in their old age by listening to their stories, but always with that secret condescension, smugly superior in the knowledge that “if they knew what I knew…” 

Generation Gap. 

Far too many kids want to be unlike their parents (this may be a very good thing in some cases). I am convinced that when the parents are “doing the right thing” the kids will grow up wanting to be like their parents (or, for “right” you can substitute “natural”). 

Land is only truly inhabited when it is lived on, known, and used (and sustainably, without diminishing productivity) by a family or community continuously, i.e. generation to generation, i.e. when it has a history. People are the memory of the land, and its greater consciousness. Properly inhabited land is a combination of land and people whose sum is greater than its parts--like a watch or a cataphract. 

The real key to family continuity (and incidentally to the best management of land) is to add the ingredient of land and shared human activity over generations on a tract of land. 

But even now there are exceptions. The sons and grandsons of ranchers, or even lumberjacks, at least to the extent that they are working on the same land as their ancestors, more often than not want to follow in the footsteps of their fathers, keep up the family tradition--they are proud of being part of some kind of continuity, something “bigger than themselves”. When they hear grandpa reminiscing about some incidents, about a lame heifer down in Cottonwood Canyon, or how Uncle Bill lost an eye bucking logs on the North Fork on 45, they pay attention, and remember the story to tell their own grandkids someday, because it means something to them, it is relevant to their own experience; they can relate. And so it has gone, the campfires of our hunting-gathering predecessors, generation on generation, and for all those generations down the millenia, it has bound people closer, individual to individual, person to person, generation to generation. 

This is nothing “natural” or even inevitable about the “generation gap.” It is a product of a rapidly changing society--the faster the change, the wider the gap. 

Some people think that religion is the key to keeping families together, but anyone can tell you that some of the most violent rebellion comes from kids brought up in the most religious environments. 

What really narrows the gap is not just having some belief in common, but sharing time day-to-day activity to a common purpose. It is just as “natural” as teenage rebellion for kids to want to tag along with mom or dad, to do what they are doing, to be together, to share experiences. Distinctively, kids have the solution to the generation gap from birth--they want connection, not separation. Only when separation is forced on them by design or circumstance do they gradually turn sour and rebel.