The Greatest Generation

I wasn't alive on December 7, 1941, but the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor that day was the seminal event of my parents' lives.  Lives that had been forged growing up during the depression.

The two events instilled in them, and their generation, a sense of solidarity and collective responsibility, a societal oneness and purpose, that has been steadily eroding ever since their children grew up in the American cornucopia that came out of World War II.  With the coming of the baby boomers into the seat of power, the world has been sorely afflicted.

All those Vietnam drafter dodgers or deferrers brought us hard wars, men like the Great Bird Hunter (how many deferments, Dick?) and the Decider (where were you during your tour in the National Guard, Dubya?) who slept while 9/11 was revealed to them beforehand and botched the ensuing war, Neo-Cons who charged incompetently into the wrong war because that was the shock and awe of their wet dreams.  Oh the inhumanity, the inhumanity wrought by the cowboy attitude and torture as foreign policy that came from them.

And those Masters of the Universe on Wall Street with their reckless trading and obscene paydays who brought down the whole world economy and put off most Americans' retirements by at least a decade, shame!  MBA programs (like the one Dubya took) should start teaching bonafide ethics courses. 

My parents, who weathered the Great Depression and rolled back the rising tide of evil in the world during a great war, were part of a generation of doers and can-doers who gave us the secure world we grew up in, a world much greater than they were born into, through prudence, industriousness, responsibility, charity and togetherness.  Seventy-one years after 9/11, what will our children write about us?