Aging seems to involve a constant examining of long held beliefs in light of the changes that time brings. I think back to my time in college, where females could not wear pants to class, there was such a thing as married student’s housing, and girls’ dorm rooms were off limits to all males except family members. In addition there were curfew hours (for the girls only) that put them in the dorms by ten during the week and midnight on the weekends. Not to mention that Ivy League schools and many flagship state schools were all male. Today’s students would look at you with incredulity if you told them they had to be in their rooms by ten o’clock, as they are just getting ready to go out for the evening at that hour.
We would like to think that certain qualities such as honesty, compassion, courage, resourcefulness, etc are timeless, and will always be a welcome addition to all of our lives. However, some purely social norms have changed, and it seems more and more difficult to accept these changes as the years pile up.
Take mental health. I look back to World War II and the approach to this issue by two very different generals. The first one is George Patton, a Lieutenant General in 1943, and the commanding general of the 7th US Army Corps. While visiting a hospital for the wounded in his command, he asked a young man lying in a bed what he was there for. The young man, all of 18, replied that “It’s my nerves,” whereupon the general called him a coward and slapped him. While Patton was eventually forced to apologize and lost his command, he none-the-less reflected a generally held view of mental health at that time. He was not the only one. Take Joseph Kennedy, father of John F. Kennedy, 35th President of the United States, who had his mentally disabled daughter lobotomized around this time without the knowledge of his wife or the consent of his daughter. And he did this legally. The mentally challenged were to be tucked away, kept out of sight, and often, as in the case of the young soldier, despised.
Meanwhile there was another general, a Marine who was the Deputy Chief of Staff for the 10th Army on Okinawa where what would be a bloody three month battle for the island was in train. Concerned about the men and how they were being treated, Major General O. P. Smith made it a point to go to what he called a “psychopathic hospital” on the island to see how the men were treated. He was impressed by the compassion of the doctors, and this survivor of three amphibious landings in the Pacific with Korea still to come only said, “War is terrible and sometimes there are men who simply cannot take it anymore. We cannot know what they have been though.”
Both of these generals were in their fifties, and with life expectancy in 1945 in the mid-sixties, both would be considered seniors today. In addition, both men had spent their adult lives in the military, and both men had seen bloody conflict. Yet one was able to move beyond his times, while the other was not. From the distance that history gives, admiration goes to the one that was more empathetic. And perhaps that is the solution to the whole issue. Empathy for those whose lives are now so different from what ours were. Lives that are not necessarily better or worse…just different.