Cultural Survival Skills

D-Day, 2019

Right above my computer, stuck to the edge of a shelf, is a colorful circular D-Day sticker. It is a little remembrance of my visit to the D-Day museum in New Orleans.

I have never forgotten my visit there, some time in the late 1980’s. It was an experience that still brings a lump in my throat, as it did during the duration of my visit there.

I was only two years old on the real D-Day. My father was in the Navy and I was raised by my mother and her other female friends whose husbands were away and at war.

The vintage military equipment displayed at the museum already looked and felt like it came from another age. And it did. It’s comparative primitive, even oddly nostalgic appearance belied its profound lethality.

There were a great many photographs of our young fighting men. They were in their respective uniforms and often the had bright smiles on their youthful faces, much as they would have smiled for their high school graduation pictures.

So many of these young men smiled as they prepared to enter hell on earth.

As a U.S. Navy veteran, it was easy to imagine how I would have felt among these men as they prepared themselves for greatest assault on evil in the history of the world….These young men, smiling in the face of probable death.

This American cohort, and their loved ones, were certainly the Greatest Generation of our modern times.

From my American cultural vantage-point in the year 2019, I can reach no other conclusion.

I pray that, if necessary, our young Americans under the guidance elderly wisdom and courage, could again save the world from a hideous scourge of pandemic evil.

But I must be honest. I hate to admit that I have my sad doubts that America’s Post-Modern population could tolerate the great sustained painful sacrifices necessary for such a repeat performance.

Sadly, I judge that it is just a matter of time before America will need the profound sacrifices of yet another “Greatest Generation” in order to survive.

Will it be there?

Please see this short video, honoring our D-Day American fighting forces.

https://www.prageru.com/video/d-day/

V. Thomas Mawhinney, 6/6/19

Tags: 2019, Could We Do It Again?, D-Day, Our Greatest Generation, Saving the World, The D-Day Museum, V. Thomas Mawhinney Ph.D., VTM

This entry was posted on June 6, 2019 at 10:01 AM and is filed under Boiling the American Frog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.