My wife and I just finished watching the first installment of Ken Burns' "The War" on PBS. Both of our fathers were combat veterans of World War II. Her father chose the Army as a career, eventually retiring in 1971 when ordered to Vietnam for a second tour. He also saw action in Korea. My father couldn't wait to get out of the Army when he returned to Denver in January 1946 from occupation duty in Germany. He wanted to go to college, ger married, and have a passel of kids. He accomplished all of those goals.
Both of these veterans are dead. We're not there yet, but there will come a time when we'll mark the passing of "The Last Surviving World War II Veteran." As Burns notes many time in this series, this generation was asked to make a huge sacrifice, and they came through. I don't like to romanticize it, and neither did our fathers.
Since 1945, the country has not experienced the kind of shared sacrifice that WWII demanded. Perhaps we had an inkling of the aftermath of Pearl Harbor immediately following the attacks of 9/11. But that shared sense of outrage was squandered by Bush & Co., with the invasion of Iraq in March 2003.
Sunday evening was a time for documentaries. The History Channel featured one on "The Hippies," followed by "The Hillbillies." The three shows didn't have a lot in common, but they all carried a shared sense of loss. The U.S. performance in WWII made it a world power, but we squandered that on Cold War misadventures. The hippies' peace & love ideas degenerated into drug abuse and hedonism. The eastern mountain people that are the hillbillies gave rise to a rich culture of storytelling and music, but they've become members of the huge Southern Wal-Mart cult.
The U.S. keeps reinventing itself. That's been its strength, but how much more of it can we stand?
No comments:
Post a Comment