Sigh. I feel that we have failed that generation.
I do too.
A remedy:
Every single politician, government employee, middle schooler, new voter / citizen should have to walk somberly thru Arlington National Cemetery, past each grave, escorted by servicemen, listening to the names of 400,000 servicemen who died for our company, and our freedom.
Would be great to have a Patriot ‘ s Holodeck for this in every state capitol.
I don’t know about generations. My dad hated FDR, Kennedy, Carter. Glad he made it to see Reagan.
My mom outlived him by 22 years. She only watched the MSM evening news. She loved FDR (”Well - he won WWII and got us out of the Depression”) And I learned to keep my mouth shut (mostly) about obama (”Well - he’s doing the best he can.”)
And I know lots of young people signed up for the military post 9/11 and patriotism took a turn there for awhile. But yes - it was easy for most of us to go back to our TV and buying crap at the stores while our guys were spending hard years in Iraq and Afghanistan.
While those wars in no way compare to WWII, it has amazed me how much coverage WWII got in the papers of the day. Before Germany was beat it would be the first 12 to 14 pages of the paper JUST on war news.
It seemed that after a year in Iraq there was a small article on page 4 of the paper about the war.
It’s sort of complicated. My Dad was in the Army Infantry in WWII, N. Africa, Italy & Germany. FDR was his Commander-in-Chief. - He mostly voted Democrat after that. (Daddy’s hearing was pretty much destroyed by the explosions in the war. So, he missed a lot of subtle hints that Democrats might be headed in the wrong direction.) To his credit, he did vote for Reagan after Jimmy Carter. I think *that* Carter debacle opened his eyes for a while anyway. - He died in 2002; but I doubt he would have voted for Obama if he had lived. (At first, he sort of *excused* draft dodging Clinton & seemed to think Hillary was such a smart lady & NOBODY detested a draft dodger worse than my Daddy back in the day. He went through a lot in combat; said that homosexuals weren’t able to endure basic training like it was back then.)