The Great Recession Saved My Generation by Shaun Rein
LewRockwell.com

I used to laugh at the aluminum foil my grandmother had squirreled away when we visited her at one of those golf retirement communities along the Florida coast. "Reusing aluminum foil!" I used to exclaim, rolling my eyes while slurping Coca-Cola and munching on McDonald's. My father would rebuke me: "Young man, Grandma invests those pennies she saves so you can go to college." I would giggle and scurry off to jack up the air conditioner and play Nintendo in the den, leaving behind my half-eaten Big Mac.

As I reached high school and started looking for my own identity, as my friends experimented with grunge, I began to envy my grandmother. Not because I understood her habits, why she was so intent on saving when it seemed so easy to make money, but because she seemed to share them with her whole generation, the Greatest Generation, united and defined through its shared experience of overcoming the Great Depression and beating Hitler. It was as if people in her generation had all attended the same schools and read the same books and listened to the same music. Whether in California, New York or Oklahoma, they had what looked like a shared identity and common values.

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