I have been watching Ken Burns “The War” about four American towns and their efforts towards winning World War II from 1942-45.
Hundreds of thousands volunteered to fight. Factories stopped producing domestic goods; one 40 acre factory stopped making cars (with 1500 parts) and instead made a plane every 63 minutes (with 1550000 parts); making only 150 cars during the years above. It was a mind boggling effort to save democracy. Mostly every family pitched in.
The times were unique. People had suffered during the Depression and wanted work and adventure. A lot of small town folks had never been to a big city or another country. Information was more controlled. People broadly trusted their government and institutions. Groups unfairly marginalized were eager to prove their loyalty to their country.
If a similar hypothetical situation were to occur today, would the people be capable of responding with the same remarkable optimism, sacrifice and efficacy? Or was it remarkably well-timed and not repeatable? I genuinely don’t know, people surprise you and remain hardworking and innovative, but it seems to me a sense of common commitment was long ago lost. Your thoughts?
Thanks to 50 years of constant propaganda designed to divide the US into two distinct groups, I think the answer is no. Everything that we do on a national level is zero-sum. The best we could hope for is half of the population pulling together and the other half complaining and attempting to sabotage the first half.
OTOH, maybe the multinationals and political think tanks would re-tune the propaganda to bring us back together. This would only happen if lots and lots of money were on the table for corporations to gobble up. And I suspect the pulling together would last until the money was gone and then the messages would go back to pulling us apart again.
There is no concept of the common good anymore in the US. We’re a bunch of scared, isolated, tribal, bigoted sheep.
This isn’t about “kids”. Americans of all ages pitched in to a communal effort. Young soldiers made huge sacrifices, but so did every other part of society.
But there was a degree of leadership, cohesiveness and naïveté which seems to have been lost. Over promotion of “being a brand” and self-esteem, and reduction of physical activity may not have helped. I don’t think my generation could have done it, and perhaps even less so now?
I dunno, I think maybe we could and would. It would depend on what and what level of threat to the nation. In fact I think it would look remarkably similar to the time of internment camps and what have you, just with different faces.
At the time of the WTC attack, I thought the US should have done something similar to what the home front did during WWII; sacrifice, reduce consumption and contribute to the war effort. Except that I thought the country should have made a concerted push to eliminate dependence on fossil fuels, improve energy efficiency and made a major push for solar and wind power generation. Instead, the US didn’t do any of that and yet we still spent trillions of dollars.
I don’t mean to speak for Chignon, but I read that as a fairly oblique way to say, “this question implicitly asks whether the people alive now are fundamentally less awesome than the people alive on December 7, 1941. This question is effectively the same as muttering derisively about ‘kids today,’ which is an unoriginal slander each generation applies to the next.”
If that’s what Chignon meant, I tend to agree with it. When Tom Brokaw entitled his book The Greatest Generation, he probably meant that phrase as an homage to his parents’ generation for rising to an extraordinary cluster of occasions.
But I often hear people use this phrase with a subtle inversion; they confuse the effect (greatness) with the cause (extraordinary circumstances). In other words, the phrase gets used to imply that one generation happened to be ambiguously “a lot better” than most generations, so they were uniquely equipped to handle extraordinary circumstances when they arose. This line of thinking risks a quick devolution into into “kids today.”
However one defines greatness of character, I believe it’s hard to judge in the absence of circumstances that demand it. And when we’re talking about an entire generation of Americans, we’re using numbers so large that there’s an inevitable regression to the mean. My take: if generation was “great,” then greatness was thrust upon it.
I think any arbitrary-but-large collection of individuals would have risen to those unique circumstances under the same conditions. Human beings do extraordinary things in response to existential threats.
I think what’s gone away is the public trust that when the government says a war half a world away is an existential threat, that it actually is such. The current generation would respond the same way to an existential threat, but after Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq, it would be hard to convince enough people of an actual personal danger.
No. America is deeply divided by race, class and ideology.
It always was, but the out groups accepted their role as subservient before. Now that they want true equality things are more divided and many majority people are more loyal to their race and beliefs than they are to the country as a whole.
If you watch the rest of the war documentary they talk about riots when blacks wanted equal treatment in factories.
This is not meant to say any generation is “more awesome” than any other. I suspect generations have always been much more similar than different. I have seen credible historians say there is a four generation cycle of generations being more classically libertine or conservative.
The series emphasizes the remarkable commitment, though. This includes lack of other non-War opportunities, being relatively ignorant about the wide world, religious faith, trust in government institutions, homogenous peer groups and a history of struggle. It is not just a comment on character, although it embodies that too to some degree. It is not necessarily “awesome” to be ignorant or naive.
In Korea, Vietnam, The Middle East, Yugoslavia or Rwanda, more people widely questioned to what degree local interests were at stake.
But could people today react to a tough situation?
Something a bit comparable might be natural disasters–hurricanes, earthquakes, floods, massive wildfires. I think in those kinds of situations a significant number of people rise to the occasion–and take significant risks to save other people.
The four generation cycle implies that the millennial are the next greatest generation.
I think millennial would welcome taxes and self sacrifice to deal with serious issues like plutocracy, climate change, resource depletion, lack of universal health care or affordable college, overpriced housing, etc.
But millennial won’t be dominant in politics until the 2040s or so.
“smh” is an internet acronym for “shaking my head,” so I’m guessing “smdh” is “shaking my damned head.” My guess is that Chignon is saying that the OP is no different from generations of older people saying disparaging things about “kids these days.”
Barring any explanation from Chingon, I think I’ll go with my guess, which is that Chingon is telling us that they can be safely ignored as they have nothing to contribute to the dialogue.
what you’re ignoring is that back then there was an enormous threat (the Nazis/Axis powers) who could credibly take over the world. Yes, that was a serious threat to humanity. we haven’t had such a threat since then.
Honestly, if you want another devastating world war just to prove your point, you should not be listened to.
Strauss-Howe generational theory is bunk. It’s something they came up with to sell books, then used a combination of non-representative studies and cherry-picked historical events to fit their theory.
In fact, it’s not even a theory, it’s a hypothesis. It’s still bunk.
To the OP, I would say yes, were a similar threat to arise today, and were leaders to call for it, we could have a similar response*. Just because divisions are more publicized today (owing to traditionally underrepresented groups having a greater voice on the national stage than they used to) doesn’t actually mean those divisions are new or stronger.
Tangentially related, I wish people wouldn’t overplay the combined “sacrifice” of the WWII generation(s). I’m pretty sure that the owners of all those factories that transitioned to supporting the war effort still got paid in the end. Ditto with those who stayed home and didn’t actually have to go into combat. They thumped their chests and said “we stand by you!” well enough, but they obviously weren’t literally standing by them, otherwise some of them might have gotten shot or blown apart by the Nazis. I don’t think people should be credited as heroes just because they were around at the same time a bunch of other people got drafted (or even volunteered) to become heroes.
*ETA: Being in my senior year of high school on 9/11, I honestly believe the Bush administration could have gotten a similar level of support if he had called for it as needed. But of course it wasn’t. The problem wasn’t that the US military wasn’t big enough or well enough supplied for Afghanistan, the problem was that it wasn’t used appropriately to achieve the desired end.
A difference between December 7, 1941 and September 11, 2001 is that when Japan attacked Pearl Harbor there was a clear enemy government in a defined and easily determined location to respond to. When a bunch of extra-national thugs in a dessert cave perpetrated the attack on New York city, the Pentagon, and the airplane that wound up going nose-first into a farm field there wasn’t a clearly defined government/nation and we didn’t even know where the hell those responsible were holed up. The two situations were a bit different.
Absolutely, I think if we had an existential threat folks would pull together. Because we don’t, folks have the “luxury” of remaining divided. Humanity hasn’t changed that much in just a couple generations, but thank Og we aren’t fighting WWIII.