From 1873 to 1893 to 1913, people in North America went through first the 20 years of the long depression and then the 20 years of the long boom (in Canada much better known as the Wheat or Rail Boom).
Children born early in the Era of High Modernity , say between 1870 and 1885, were old enough to fully enjoy the fruits of that long Edwardian summer of optimism and exuberance between 1893-1913.
And then were often too old to enjoy the mud (and death) of the Great War.
Those born after 1885 and on until 1900 felt cheated - they had missed the boom Edwardian Years but got to enjoy all of the mud and all of the death of WWI.
The Twenties slumped except for a brief recovery in 1924-1929, then they had the Great Depression (The Ten Years Lost/LES DIX ANS PERDU) and the tight years of WWII.
When the 20th century's long boom between 1950 to 1970 began, they were more than ready for it.
In Canada, these now-elderly teenagers of the Edwardian Era were determined to relive their missed youth - this time right - and the Canadian Natural Resources Boom of the 1950s (what I call LES DIX ANS TROUVE/THE TEN YEARS FOUND) was wallowed liberally in late Edwardian hubris .
Seen in this light of feeling long cheated, the Boom's promotors (BC premier Wacky Bennett a clear example) felt they had good cause to be free of any restraints upon their soon-to-be-fading powers.
A cohort or generation is as important as to where and why it divides internally, as for what unites these 30 years worth of children from the generations before and after them...
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Why My Urgency ?
- Michael Marshall
- Nova Scotia
- Histories of WWII all start with the presumption that it was a war raged between humans and human ideologies, with Nature’s climate and geography as side issues easily surmounted.My blog, on the contrary will only accept that it was conflict between humans and their ideology that STARTED the war but that it was the barriers thrown up by Mother Nature (geography & climate) that turned it into a war that lasted between 6 to 15 years and expanded to thoroughly involve all the world’s oceans and continents. High Modernity may have started the war convinced that Nature had been conquered and was about to be soon replaced by human Synthetic Autarky and that only human Tiger tanks and human Typhoon planes were to be feared. But by the end, more and more people had lost their naive faith in Scientism and were beginning to accept that humanity was thoroughly entangled with both the Nature of plants, animals & microbes as well as the Nature of so called “lesser” humanity. By 1965, the world was definitely entering the Age of Entanglement. Billions still believed - at least in part -with the promises of High Modernity but intellectually & emotionally, it was no longer dominant...
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