The other day, one of my coworkers liked some article on Facebook that basically was some senior talking about how they were offended that the youth of today don't think they "lived green" back in the day, so they proceeded to list off all the ways in which they were superior to youth of today because those silly youth of today use cell phones and TVs and stuff when they didn't have those things and that makes them better people, and so on and so on. Typical old-person rant, to me. But that's not really what got me thinking.
I happened to see a few of the comments to this article, and most were the typical "Yeah you go girl!" kind of thing. Then there was this one about how "And don't forget how our boys won us freedom back in WWII!!"
And it made me cringe. Then not a day or so later, I heard a big jerk in my office talking to someone and he made some comment about how "You would think the French would respect us more considering we bailed them out back in WWII."
I'm sorry, I am a patriot as much as anyone, but our collective reverie over World War II just has to stop.
Look, I'm not saying that I don't appreciate what the men and women who fought in WWII accomplished. They helped put an end to one of the greatest evils ever known to humanity. That's a big deal.
But some people sure can't get past it. Really, you're still expecting the French to, what, bow down to us because we
That's why the Second World War has become the low hanging fruit of wars. It's the easiest conflict to point back to and say "Yes. That was good. That was well worth fighting for." The terms of that war are easy for people to understand. We won, and spurned on the biggest economic growth spurt in possibly all of history. And if we had lost, the world would have been overrun by an evil bent on world domination. See, clean cut, line in the sand, easy to understand. Good/bad.
It was the last war that America was engaged in that was so easy to define. People barely remember Korea, much less understand what it was about. Vietnam still remains controversial. Then you have all those other smaller-scaled actions like Bosnia, or the ongoing craziness in the Middle East. Those conflicts necessarily carry complex political implications, meaning that if you salute the soldier who volunteered for Vietnam, you also have to sorta kinda make the case for all those youths at that time who burned their draft cards and skipped town, because in the long run that war got messy, had a bad end, and its goals became a confused splatter of paint on a map. So people just kinda skip that one. And many others after it.
Another thing. My guess* is that this reverie is a uniquely American perspective on World War II. Much like every other conflict, Americans typically don't have to fight on their home soil. We don't know what it means to have our capital city bombed night in and night out by a country that's closer to them than the distance from California to Maine.** But WWII left permanent psychological and physical scars on the other countries involved that we just can't comprehend. Britain basically saw its entire empire it had spent accumulating for hundreds of years evaporate within ten years. Germany spent years getting back to where it was, and even today they still have laws on the books preventing people from praising Hitler. Japan was so devastated that they developed Godzilla to try and cope with it. And so on and so on.
*Because I haven't talked this over with many non-Americans. Hell, I haven't talked it over with any Americans, either.
**Again, just a guess. I'm too lazy to research that fact but it seems reasonable.
So please, next time you go praising that (justly earned name) "Greatest Generation," just stop and think. Maybe you should just thank them privately.
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