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Sure, I liked the Brokaw book, and I'm glad he devoted his time and talent to acknowledging my parents' generation for World War Two. However, my father was born before his time, and he came back from Burma as something very much like the stereotypical Viet Nam vet, dying early and tragically as a result. I also gather from research that the Russians were going to beat Hitler with or without our help, so if we hadn't cut off the oil supply from the Japanese and thus provoked them into Pearl Harbor, the old policy of isolationism would have achieved its goals without the United States going to war at all. That being the case, it's hard for me to accept World War II as our parents' generation's greatest accomplishment.
What makes it harder is that, while other generations have gone to war, for every good and bad reason from the auguries found in the entrails of sacrificial chickens at the start of Roman senatorial sessions to the loss of an ear by a smuggler named "Jenkins," my father's generation did something else, something unique and noble. It was by no means a unanimous decision, and in fact many members of that generation and those that have followed resist it to this day, but that was the generation responsible for Civil Rights. Those were the voters who elected the Presidents who pushed for legislation and appointed Supreme Court Justices who interpreted the Law of the Land as applying equally to all of its inhabitants. They elected the Congressmen who enacted new legislation as well, and enough of them supported it to make to come to pass.
Again, it was not and is not a unanimous decision, and the fight will go on for some time, with the pendulum swinging to every conceivable extreme before settling where they really envisioned it, but it was a conscious decision to start serving the American pie that had been the more or less exclusive property of WASP males to minorities and women. When History looks back for something unique on which to base its judgment of our immediate forbearers, it will have to look past World War II. War, unfortunately, is not the exclusive property of any one generation or portion thereof.
I believe that History will judge that generation of Americans on Civil Rights, and I believe that it will judge that generation to have been uniquely great.
Response received 2/20/01 –
RE: WOTS - Greatest Generation
Regarding the so-called "Greatest Generation," my feelings can be summed up rather well by something writer P.J. O'Rourke once said:
"I've had it with this Greatest Generation malarkey. These are the people who have one stock-market crash in 1929, and it takes them a dozen years to go get a job. Then they wait until Germany and Japan have conquered half the world before it occurs to them to get involved in World War II.
After that, they step on their dick in Korea, spend the 1950's watching Lawrence Welk and drinking Blatz, come up with the idea for Vietnam and elect Richard Nixon. Screw them!!!"
Greatest Generation? ... Yeah, and I've got some Oldsmobile stock ya might be interested in too!