Start Date: Summer 2023
This last spring we commemorated Memorial Day 2023. In November, Veteran’s Day. Somewhere between the BBQs and picnics at the beach we must remember those who sacrificed their lives in service and those who came home and built the country.
I am thinking in particular of a generation born a century earlier. To them this is a “Thank You” note, a love letter, and an apology.
They were born in 1923, or thereabouts. The roaring twenties. But few lived the life of F. Scott Fitzgerald or his fictional characters.
They began first grade weeks before the stock market crash of 1929. They grew up in the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl. Life was simple and challenging. In 1941 they graduated to what was expected to be a quiet summer in an isolated United States on the upswing. Cars were being manufactured by the millions. The theaters were showing “The Maltese Falcon” and “Citizen Kane”
Then came December 7th. The Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. Europe had been at war for years and the threat of Asia known to leaders. But the idea of a massive assault on America was something not in the national mindset, anymore than the 9-11 attacks were imagined on September 10, 2001.
Just months after graduating from high school teenage boys were in the military preparing to go to war. Whether from small towns in rural America, or the big cities, many had never been outside of their hometown. Now they were being sent to faraway nations in Europe, or in the Pacific to places completely unknown.
For four years they fought the Germans, the Japanese, malaria, cold, and hunger. They experienced Guadalcanal, D-Day, the Death March to Bataan, and liberation of German concentration camps. Back home the women filled the factories and even served as test pilots. As Tom Brokaw argued in his book “The Great Generation”, they were not perfect but they were great.
Then in 1945 our nation’s young men came home to not one minute of PTSD therapy or treatment. They must have been damaged. It would be impossible to not be. But they left it behind as they raced to catch up on school, work, marriage, homes, and children.
Enter the Baby Boom. The country was just about built for us. Homes, neighborhoods, schools. We were so big in number everything was driven by our presence.
On average we did fairly well. Most of us made use of our parents success, went to school, and got jobs. Maybe we took a little longer but we moved on.
However some thread of rebellion ran through. The Great Generation lived through Hell. The Baby Boomers seemed to have to make their own.
Some of it was Vietnam. No one really knew what it was, where it was, or why it was. Some felt you should never question duty. Others needed to question everything. Sex, drugs, and Rock-n-Roll. Free love, experimentation, and music, good and bad, that celebrated both. Timothy Leary, a psychologist, advocated the use of drugs and told his followers to: “Turn on, tune in, drop out”
Then, oops, become hopelessly addicted, and homeless. In L.A. the bodies on the streets can hardly be counted. There are well over 100,000 in the state. No, they didn’t get laid off from Walmart. They are suffering major dysfunction. Drugs finance the gangs and cartels. A local neighborhood has had shootouts in shopping center parking lots over drug sales at midday in broad daylight. We didn’t just start the experimentation of drugs, we let it become a massive industry. Countries are controlled by narco-terrorists. Drug trafficking is destroying the border. Urban gangs dominate low-income neighborhoods. The suburban college kids mostly survived their youthful indiscretions in the 1960’s and 1970’s, but they set up the downward spiral, carried on by the “progressive” policies of their children.
“Free love” was meant to be liberating, particularly for women. It didn’t work out so well. In 1950 only 5% of children were living in single parent homes. Probably most were widows and divorcees given the mores of the time. Now roughly two thirds of African American children live in single parent homes. A little less than half of Hispanics. So the people who are generally least able to thrive solo are the ones carrying the biggest load. However hard mothers work, raising children with neither personal nor financial support from a loving partner is a huge challenge. Children grow up on welfare in drug filled neighborhoods ruled by gangs who provide the only hierarchal role model for male behaviors.
Back in WWII the Tuskegee airmen were black fighter pilots who came from an America with harsh and legally sanctioned racial discrimination and segregation. But they fought for their country because somehow they knew that Hitler would be worse. Imagine if they knew their grandchildren and great-grandchildren were protesting to bring it back, insisting on not being taught English, math, or science, and asking for segregation in schools and dorms and graduations. Imagine men who saw Auschwitz or survived a Japanese POW camp being screamed at that pronouns are violence.
In 2001 our nation experienced another airborne attack, this time from terrorists. The largest target, the World Trade Center, was an eclectic collection of civilians from around the world. We pulled together as a nation. Some of the WWII vets lived to see it. Some were spared the knowledge. But we stepped up.
Yet just two decades onward more than 3/4 of young people of draft age are ineligible due to obesity, criminal history, lack of GED level education, or drug dependence. Education is failing. Standards are reduced if not entirely abandoned. in some districts even the educators need not display proficiency. Leaders and academics endlessly tell us that we are the enemy. They deem us a society of nothing but oppressors or victims. There cannot be a greater path to civilizational suicide than to persuade a nation to hate itself.
A century on from their birth, as we bury the last of the Class of ’41 are we to surrender all for which they fought. Or do we accept that we owe them better?