I regularly think about something in week-long intervals. This is probably because during the week, I don’t have much time to read or think, but on weekends I have a bit of time to poke around and find interesting stuff to read.
This week, I’ll be thinking about this:
Now my generation is disillusionized, and, I think, to a certain extent, brutalized, by the cataclysm which their complacent folly engendered. The acceleration of life for us has been so great that into the last few years have been crowded the experiences and the ideas of a normal lifetime. We have in our unregenerate youth learned the practicality and the cynicism that is safe only in unregenerate old age. We have been forced to become realists overnight, instead of idealists, as was our birthright. We have seen man at his lowest, woman at her lightest, in the terrible moral chaos of Europe. We have been forced to question, and in many cases to discard, the religion of our fathers. We have seen hideous peculation, greed, anger, hatred, malice, and all uncharitableness, unmasked and rampant and unashamed. We have been forced to live in an atmosphere of ‘tomorrow we die,’ and so, naturally, we drank and were merry. We have seen the rottenness and shortcomings of all governments, even the best and most stable. We have seen entire social systems overthrown, and our own called in question. In short, we have seen the inherent beastliness of the human race revealed in an infernal apocalypse.
John F. Carter, “These Wild Young People, By One of Them,” Atlantic Monthly, 126 (September 1920): 301-304
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What generation since this was written hasn’t this been true of ?