This is not about wars, or hard times, or even the plague, but about the type of people it takes to persevere and emerge victorious.
What we know now that we didn’t know in 1929, or 1942, or 1964 is that the type of people who emerge victorious from those things are those that have strength of character, common sense and courage, far more then superior education, opportunity, and money are the ingredients to the survival of a free society.
Or, if we choose, we could be like France.
In 1942, WWII, we sent troops ashore in North Africa in the Atlantic and on Guadalcanal in the Pacific beginning three long, bloody years of marching toward the heart of Germany and Japan. Back home, America was consumed with the track of her sons from beach landings (My father was in three: North Africa, Sicily and Italy) and there were daily reports on the radio and in newspapers. To the greatest extend possible, local newspapers kept abreast of every native son. We were all in this together.
Then, kids who were 13 in December ’41 were enlisting by Fall 1944, just in time for the final big push at the Battle of the Bulge in Belgium and the Philippine Sea. Bill Mauldin did a cartoon of a fly-boy colonel meeting his uncle in Italy.
America was consumed with “the Wahr”, and for good reason.
We went from “defending America” to “saving the world” in just over three years, and almost every American was on board with risking their sons to give that extra punch to finish the job, for they all knew what the war was really about. Not nearly as well educated as Bill Kristol, still, they knew “Why We Fought”.
And in truth, they were likely much more awake (not woke) than we are today, which also explains the presence of a Bill Kristol in our rear view mirrors today. They knew what they stood to lose. They thought more clearly because they thought more common sensicially, using their own minds.
The day after Pearl Harbor is was the People who declared war on the Axis powers. FDR simply did what was expected of him for he dared not do otherwise. The same for the isolationist Republicans, who saw America more in terms of dollars and cents.
Today we are seeing children, many the great grandchildren of those men who hit those beaches and manned those destroyers, who are burning buildings, rioting and looting, even though many are quite affluent now, unlike granddad. They are not poor. Nor are they un-educated. In fact, the opposite.
They have no greater Cause than having their own way; not being told “no”. So something went horribly wrong between the WWII generation and the current generation. For one, that mindset not only applies to those children, but to the generation of their parents and elected leaders, most of whom were just as spoiled wealthy as they are; both generations mostly educated to despise anything about the common herd.
Also, many of those kids’ parents didn’t even come to America until after World War II. We invited millions in. And we also failed, on purpose, to require them to know what “being American” had always meant, as exemplified by those who fought victoriously in World War II
I got a “three-fer”. I had my father, and my grandfather, and I had my school, who still taught us what the parents thought was most important to be taught.
Turns out, I was the last of the generation where parents had control of their children’s educations. We had discarded the “what’s special about America? education-meme” at about the same time, c1965-1970, when, coincidentally, we handed over control of our public schools to the federal government, who began paying the bills.
A fool’s bargain.
It was my grandfather, Sam, who I never got around to doing a chapter about in “Famous Common People I have Known”, told me more about my dad’s 3-year tour to North Africa and Italy, and who never saw my sister until 1945. Dad didn’t like to talk about it.
Granddad was the family pillar. He was born in 1896 in east Tennessee, near Oak Ridge. His family had settled a large farm around 1700, but by the time he was 20 that farm had been split up by heirs so many times being a “landowner” wasn’t such a big deal, so he sold his share of the farm to his brothers, married a local school teacher and moved to SW Virginia, where he took work with a coal company, quickly earning twice more than what the farm ever earned. My dad was born in 1921.
Granddad was not unusual for his generation, having seen the Wright Brothers first flight in 1903, Lucky Lindy’s solo flight across the Atlantic in ’27, and finally, two years before he died, a man, an American man, walked on the Moon, in 1969. But when I asked him what was his most memorable event, he told me the building of the Panama Canal, which was completed when he was 18.
Think about that.
Below is one of those “shoulders we stand on” 2-minute films that details how much more about the price of liberty granddad’s generation knew than did mine (born 1945), and the pain they had to endure to hold onto it. They even endured the Spanish Flu epidemic (which killed Donald Trump’s grandfather) which took more than 500K lives in America (versus 172K with ChinaFlu in America.) I’ll bet that hurts the Democrats.
So every few days just pause and reflect on the Big Picture, the Why-We-Fight- case.
More later.
And watch this interesting 2-minute presentation of just what one generation, born in 1900, got to witness. Then compare with yours. Then take note of what you don’t know that they did.
