I feel as if I'm back in the eighth grade. They moved my desk again.

Back in Miss O'Donnell's Spanish class, I sat in 24 of the 30 possible locations before the school year was through. I kept a little chart. I almost filled it. This was back in the day when teachers were fond of asking, "Do you think you can make a living being a wise guy, Mr. O'Neill?"

Turns out you can. But that isn't why I was moved this time. The newsroom is remodeling yet again. We do that so often here, you'd think it was Market Square.

So, this week, while keeping my streak of 21 consecutive years without a window seat alive, I packed up my desk to move to a temporary location. As I was boxing up my working life, I came across a couple of old newspaper clippings sent by readers in the recent past. One was a June 24, 1934, column from the Pittsburgh Sunday Sun-Telegraph.

"How Young Generation Hates Us," was the headline for a piece by B.C. Forbes, a bespectacled fellow whose dour mug shot made him appear to be a guy who'd keep a kid's ball if it was hit over his fence.

"I am 'an old reactionary,' " his column began. "A youthful reader of this column vehemently says so."

It occurred to me immediately that this youth would be at least 90 by now. He'd also be among what Tom Brokaw has famously called "The Greatest Generation."

Mr. Forbes didn't see it that way. His complaint had something of a contemporary feel:

"Some of us, able to look back 40 or 50 years, have sometimes been foolish enough to reason that real progress has been achieved, that during our lifetime the workweek and the workday have been mercifully shortened, that the majority of families have been able to acquire many conveniences and comforts and luxuries not widely enjoyed when we entered the battle of life, that average homes had greatly improved, that a better variety of food had become available, that there had been a gratifying increase in vacations and travel and recreation and amusements, that the standard of education among ordinary folks had been enormously raised, that there had been phenomenal expansion in the availability of news concerning events throughout the world, that the drudgery borne by our grandmothers and even our mothers had been enormously lightened for the mothers and other housewives of today, that there had been an amazing multiplication of savings, equally amazing multiplication of insurance protection for widows and children."

To borrow two of Mr. Forbes' favored words, that is one amazing, enormous 163-word sentence. Mind you, he was writing this with the Great Depression well into in its fifth year, with five long years yet to run.

Mr. Forbes was moved to defend his generation because a young Leonard Anderson (no age given) wrote to tell him "if we cannot make a better and more decent world for ourselves and our descendants than your generation is handing down to us, we will have reason to hide our faces in shame to our children."

Neither could know that World War II was only five years away, and that before it was over, by some estimates, more than 70 million people would be killed, most of them civilians. The United States, blessed by geography, was mostly spared the civilian casualties, but lost 417,00 men and women in the armed forces -- and could be said to have gotten off lucky given the death toll in Europe and Asia.

Perspective is everything. Forbes was comfortable, and had some justifiable pride in his generation's achievements. But the younger Anderson saw "the greed, dishonesty, hypocrisy, stupidity and general incompetence of this generation managing our social, political and economic affairs" which made "life today hell on earth, with mass unemployment, poverty and starvation in a time when, through the advance of science and inventions, there should be plenty for all."

Indeed, the other clipping I found, from Nov. 28, 1933, called for a demonstration at the corner of 34th and Ligonier streets because, in that season of Thanksgiving, "in the Strip thousands of unemployed are facing the fifth winter of starvation, evictions, sheriff and constable sales and are forced to live on a measly 90 cents a week."

We have similar debates today between old and young, between haves and have-nots. We're debating the worth of universal health care and the G-20 summit (that the leaders of the great powers may be boring rather than bombing each other is surely progress, however.)

I told myself as I unpacked that a move across a newsroom is nothing in a year when too many have been moved clear out of their homes, and the truth of any age is found somewhere between the takes of Mr. Forbes and Mr. Anderson.