Exactly right. I find that description of any American generation to be completely distasteful. Heck, if you want to go there, then the Patriots who fought in the Revolutionary war were the greatest generation. They fail and America doesn't exist. Stupid Peter Jennings...
"...Heck, if you want to go there, then the Patriots who fought in the Revolutionary war were the greatest generation. They fail and America doesn't exist. ..."
While they were great, they did not save the whole world. The Allied WWII vets did.
"Exactly right. I find that description of any American generation to be completely distasteful."
People with your attitude--minimizing the contribution of those who lived during and fought in WWII--always amaze me.
The people of that generation were my parents, my teachers, my coaches, my Sunday School teachers, the parents of my friends, my pastors, my camp counselors.
Do you know how many of them came back from the battlefields with health so ruined after being POW's that they never recovered so they could really enjoy life? My childhood memories of going to the post office or the grocery store with my parents and seeing many men in wheelchairs, missing limbs, on crutches, trying to exist on prothetic limbs, missing eyes or parts of their faces is still very vivid.
I had teachers and camp counselors who were shot down over Europe, yet struggled their way back to England so they could report the intel they had observed. I had teachers who went into the murderous gunfire of Pacific islands as medics and corpsmen. I knew people who volunteers right after Pearl Harbor and didn't come home for five-plus years.
Why did they do all of this?
Because America was fighting for our life. They answered a call just as the folks fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan and Vietnam and Korea did.
But guys like you who denigrate the great sacrifices of that great group of people really test my patience.
Tom Brokaw, actually, but I get the point. The older I get and the more that I learn of American history, the more appreciative that I am of what past generations have accomplished. But if the WW II generation was the "greatest ever," then why did they saddle us with high taxes, an unsustainable welfare state, and spawn the vain, self-absorbed Baby Boomers?