I celebrated my 71st birthday this last Thanksgiving weekend. It is hard to comprehend. Seventy-one is something that I would expect my father to be…but he would be 105 on his next birthday…if he had not already ridden into the sunset.
I often wonder what he would think if he were alive today to see the world in which his great grandchildren were living. He was a child of the Great Depression, a time when most of his generation learned to make the most out of lack.
“The Greatest Generation,” the history books called them. A generation of Americans, as JFK said, “Let the word go forth from this time and place, to friend and foe alike, that the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans — born in this century, tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace, proud of our ancient heritage — and unwilling to witness or permit the slow undoing of those human rights to which this nation has always been committed, and to which we are committed today at home and around the world.”
That generation conquered Hitler, Stalin, Hirohito, and Mussolini and from the deep wounds of a foreign war, America forged the greatest economic explosion the world had ever seen immortalized by “Baseball, hot dogs, apple pie, and Chevrolet.” For a brief time, America was that “sh ...
