If we could reach backward through time and retrieve a few things from the generations of our parents and grandparents, what would we bring back?
The following is an editorial by Armstrong Williams.
If we could reach backward through time and retrieve a few things from the generations of our parents and grandparents, what would we bring back?
Not their hardships. Not segregation, limited opportunity, inadequate medicine or the injustices many endured. Progress has delivered extraordinary blessings, and we should not romanticize the past.
But somewhere along the road to becoming more prosperous, connected, technologically advanced and comfortable, we left behind values no technology can replace.
We should retrieve them.
First, the dignity of work.
Our grandparents understood that work was more than earning money. It gave structure to life and taught responsibility, discipline and self-respect.
They worked farms, factories, kitchens, construction sites, schools and small businesses. Many performed jobs they did not particularly enjoy because their families depended upon them.
They understood that sometimes responsibility itself was the fulfillment. While we often talk about finding ourselves, they frequently found purpose through serving others, keeping their word and doing what needed to be done.
We would bring back the sacredness of family.
Families were imperfect then, just as they are today. But there was a deeper understanding that family was larger than any individual member.
Grandparents helped raise grandchildren. Aunts and uncles corrected nieces and nephews. Cousins grew up almost as siblings. Sunday dinners became classrooms where stories, values and history passed from one generation to another.
Children sat near older people and listened.
Imagine how revolutionary that would be today.
Instead of receiving every lesson from an algorithm, young people could hear firsthand how their elders survived poverty, war, discrimination, failure, heartbreak and loss.
Wisdom would again have a human voice.
We would bring back community.
Neighbors knew one another. When someone became sick, food appeared at the door. When someone died, people surrounded the family. On Sundays, families visited the sick, elderly and shut-in not because a program required it, but because people understood they had obligations to one another.
Today we can have thousands of online connections and still experience profound loneliness.
We have mastered communication without necessarily mastering communion.
We would bring back respect for elders.
Age once represented survival and experience. Wrinkles told stories. Gray hair reflected lessons younger people had not yet lived long enough to understand.
Today our culture often worships youth and novelty, behaving as though whatever is newest must automatically be better.
But information is not wisdom.
A civilization that stops listening to its elders will repeatedly pay tuition for lessons its ancestors already learned.
We would bring back patience and thrift.
Our grandparents saved before purchasing, repaired before replacing and planted before harvesting. Clothing was mended. Furniture was repaired. Food was saved. Tools lasted for decades.
They understood that meaningful things take time.
Character cannot be delivered overnight. Neither can trust, a marriage, a reputation, a business or a meaningful life. Some things become valuable precisely because they take years to build.
They also understood the difference between wanting something and needing it. They may have possessed less, but they understood stewardship.
One of their lessons remains remarkably simple:
You do not become wealthy by displaying everything you can afford.
We would bring back faith and moral formation.
For many families, faith was not confined to a building one day a week. It shaped everyday behavior.
Prayer preceded meals. Children learned gratitude. People were reminded that they answered to something greater than appetite, ambition or ego.
Faith did not make previous generations perfect. But it provided a moral vocabulary:
Duty. Sacrifice. Forgiveness. Humility. Grace. Service.
Those words remain essential in a culture increasingly centered on individual desire.
And perhaps most importantly, we would bring back resilience.
Our grandparents did not assume hardship meant life had failed them.
They expected storms.
They buried loved ones, survived wars and economic depressions, lost crops, confronted prejudice, endured illness and continued forward.
Struggle was not necessarily viewed as an interruption of life.
It was part of life.
And they learned to turn struggle into a footstool standing upon yesterday’s difficulties to reach tomorrow’s possibilities.
That may be the inheritance we need most.
We cannot and should not return to the past. But we can retrieve its wisdom.
Imagine combining the technology, medicine, opportunity and knowledge of today with the discipline, faith, patience, family bonds, stewardship, community responsibility and resilience of our grandparents.
That would not be nostalgia.
That would be progress.
Our grandparents left us more than photographs, furniture, land and family names.
They left instructions:
Work hard. Keep your word. Save something. Repair what can be repaired. Visit the sick. Respect your elders. Sit at the table together. Pray. Forgive. Care for your neighbors. Teach children where they came from.
And when life knocks you down, do not make the ground your permanent residence.
Make the struggle your footstool and rise.
___
Mr. Williams is Manager/Sole Owner of Howard Stirk Holdings I & II Broadcast Television Stations and the 2016 Multicultural Media Broadcast Owner of the year.
Follow me on X: @arightside
Editor's Note: Sinclair Broadcast Group has a business relationship with Armstrong Williams, who is a political commentator and the owner of Howard Stirk Holdings.
