REASONS WHY...
I make no excuses for my generation.
As a whole, I'd say, we've done as well as, or better than, the average such swatch of society.
Tom Brokaw did a commendable job of adding up many of the positive points of the generation's personality and followed it by an authentication by-mail response from other members attesting to the accuracy of his judgments. We can read that book and the mail-echo to see who we really were in the eyes others.
I have never had the feeling that we felt ourselves to be different from previous generations of young people or of those likely to follow us.
I have, along the way, had some misgivings which have, from time-to-time clouded my personal view of our situation but that will vary a great deal with a decade or less of our individual life span. I, for instance, having been born in 1916 grew into childhood with somewhat more memories of that complex conflict among leading nations of the world. Even though I did not actually remember wartime events rents;they were back there and influenced much that we did or considered doing. A child born a few years later, in the 1920's decade, would think political scandals and prosperity patterns more than we did, and they, too, would be concerned about establishing world-wide peace - possibly through the League of Nations as urged upon us by our own president but refused by our legislative bodies.
Much of that stayed with me into elementary school debating times, but as the Great Depression hit and held, we were forced to think of other things - just staying alive being one of them. Looking back it might be possible to think that those years of deprivation strengthened us to endure more to come such as the confused state of our own nation - hesitant, questioning, doubting, dreaming, at time trusting a bit too readily and being jerked into the conflict belatedly. That may be. Tough times do train one to endure adversity. I think we felt unsure since the early days of Franco's ventures in Spain, Il Duce's comic opera wars in Ethiopia, Eritrea and Albania plus the steady rise of Hitler, the unsteadiness of Joseph Stalin and of a dozen or so seemingly prosperous dictatorships around the world including in our nearby Carribean Sea. I am convinced my feelings changed completely. I think there was a general change in my generational group as a whole, too.
We became aggressive without seeming to be so. We rebuilt our confidence in our own abilities to do so and Pearl Harbor activated them.
That ,in a general sense, was the main purpose our generation achieved and against greater odds than we realized. Many like dangers exist and are growing. Our next generation will need to prepare to deal with them in the very near future.
A.L.M. February 10, 2005 [c491wds]
