WWII was/was not a long time ago, and other ways time messes with your head...

In My Humble Opinion
1

I was born in 1971. I feel that growing up, time was portrayed by the media and people around me in a misleading way. It’s just a theory… tell me if you agree.

WWII was “a long time ago” growing up. Those days were horrible but so far in the past. B&W movies were “old movies.” Silent films, which they would show at the Ground Round, Shakey’s, and restaurants like that while you ate peanuts and threw the shells on the floor were “really old movies.” Those were the “olden days.”

In reality, WWII ended only 26 years before I was born. WWII vets were still in their 50s and 60s. All of that old stuff wasn’t very old at all. Did people in the 70s really perceive those times as long ago? Because that would be like perceiving the 80s as long ago now, and I feel as though very few people do.

Now, in 2014, WWII really does seem like a long time ago… and yet. I was at a funeral last year, and I was talking to a senior at the lunch. He didn’t really even seem that old, but he was a WWII vet. I watched a recent History Channel documentary in which vets who were at Pearl Harbor are recounting the battle.

There are several kids of Nazi leaders (Goering, Himmler, etc.) who aren’t that old who remember their parent well. There are many concentration camp victims still around who remember those days as though they were yesterday.

And all this kindof blows my mind. It’s almost as if, in a weird way, WWII has grown closer to me as I’ve grown older.

There are still a handful of people alive born in the 1800s!

And there is plenty of other stuff. We live in a pretty weird time, when you think about it. Most communications technology was still pretty new when I was a kid–although, again, it was as if the collective culture didn’t see it that way. In the 1970s, TV was still a very young medium. Rock music was just 20 years or so old. In many ways, we have lived through the dawn of technologies that, in some form or another, will continue as far as humanity does. Heck, we are still getting used to this Internet thing, which been a factor in most people’s lives for less than 20 years.

So yeah… WWII, far from being that old horrible thing that happened “a long time ago,” was fought and experienced and remembered by many people still alive. It all just kinda blows my mind.

What are your thoughts?

2

The crash of 1929 is nearer to the moon landing then we are.

3

I like to think of people as “generational-handoffs”. That being a person who has lived long enough to know someone else who lived in a different era, but can tell about it to a person in the next generation.

For example I knew a woman (now in her 50’s) on another board who was a Lakota Indian and growing up she knew people who as children had experienced the after effects of the Wounded Knee massacre and who’s grandparents still had memories of Indian tribes riding free across the plains.

Some other African Americans who are now in their 90’s can talk about how their growing up on grandpas knee, would tell them stories about being a slave.

My grandmother who lived to be 100 could tell me of the first airplane she ever saw and how her parents came west on a covered wagon.

Their was an old tv show called “What’s My Line” (you can see it on Youtube) where one episode, made in the 1950’s featured a man who as a young child, was in Ford’s theater the night Lincoln was shot.

So in all that, things that happened long ago can very well seem quite recent.

However each and every day those people die and with them, another history book is lost.

4

I was born in 1971, and the OP resonates with me.
I think one factor is that the 1960s really were a huge sociocultural break, for most Western peoples. More than most periods, the times really were a-changin’ – and I’m not talking as some misty-eyed hippy* – historians and others really see it as a break. (One example of many: linguist John McWhorter’s book Doing our Own Thing, which focused on how public speaking, magazine writing, and popular music lyrics changed in style in the mid-to-late 60s in the US from valuing formality to valuing informality).

So, there are good reasons why WWII felt like it was from the other side of a time divide in the 1970s, while here in the 2010s it feels like the 1980s are on the same side of that time divide.

And I think color TV/film is a huge part of this. It just makes you grow up assuming the WORLD looked one way up until 1964 (A Hard Days Night), then started looking like the real world in 1965 (Help!).

*though I am one. :wink:

5

I think you are right. I also think that people thought of Vietnam as qualitatively different from other wars, so you could lump WWI, WWII & Korean vets together, but Vietnam vets were different somehow. FWIW, my husband is an Iraq vet, and he reminds me more of a WWII vet than a Vietnam vet.

Anyway, the baby boom generation is a sort of Peter Pan generation. My parents were born before WWII, but I had friends whose parents were born after, and our experiences of our parents were different (and even though I was raised more by my aunt and uncle than my parents, they were pre-WWII as well). My parents were very much the adults in the relationship, and expected my friends to call them Mr. and Mrs. Parents who were baby boomers were the types (more often) who wanted to be pals with their kids, and told their kids’ friends to use their (the parents’) first names. You rarely meet children anymore who are expected to call adults other than teachers as Mr. or Mrs./Miss/Ms. Lastname. Even really small children regularly call adults by their first names.

Apparently, baby boomers are having a huge problem becoming grandparents, and don’t want to be called “Grandma” or “grandpa,” because it makes them “feel old.” So every kid has a different sui generis nickname for their grandparents.

I could go on, but yeah. There really is a cultural divide.

I imagine there have been other ones: probably the US Civil War was one. Maybe we get about one a century. The dawn of technology and the beginning of the move to the cities would have been one that happened in the 1700s, along with the smallpox vaccine, which you could call the beginning of modern (evidence-based) medicine as well, and the first time people actually beat back a serious disease.

6

Is this perhaps also an American thing? America has a very short history; Europe has a very long one. 100 years ago is not so long ago for us.

7

Aeschines, I don’t think there was any deliberate misleading (maybe I’m being whooshed), but I can relate to the dissonance you describe. I was born 10 years before you, and I had similar thoughts about WWII. It was from a bygone era, not exactly olden, but not at all modern. It was a time of Betty Grable and black-and-white films and no TVs, and it was a conflict that bore no resemblance to the times we lived in. A World War? Sheesh…

It was not until I was thinking about the Beatles, of all things, when it occurred to me that they were playing in Hamburg only 15 years or so after the end of the war between their country and Hamburg’s. 15 years! And then of course the follow-up thought: I was born only 15 years or so after the end of WWII! It seems incongruous somehow. I was too young to really even appreciate the 60’s cultural revolution. I was 9 when the Beatles broke up, just a kid! My high school memories are from the disco era. How could I be just-that-close to being contemporaneous with WWII? Impossible!

I wonder if my son thinks the same thing about, say, the moon landing, an historic but dusty old event, not at all of his time. Or Watergate or the Viet Nam war or the fall of the Berlin Wall. I’ll ask him.

8

About a year or so back I asked a question on the Straightdope about how people reacted to the atomic bomb being dropped on Hiroshima, I was taken aback when one poster replied detailing his own reactions to the event, that he was not only around then but old enough to remember it clearly.

I really shouldn’t have been surprised because its not that long ago, but I was. Perhaps because it was merely that I don’t expect the older generation to be online, but again thats an assumption on my part.

I was born in the late 70’s for what thats worth.

9

I think about this when I think about the Civil Rights movement, or after I watch a documentary series like “Eyes on the Prize”.

It wasn’t long ago when MLK and all those folks were marching in the streets. My parents would have been teenagers during those times. The angry white crowds (like the rioters at Ole Miss) were comprised of people who were just slightly older than them. Or in the case of the angry parents fighting desegregation, they were my grandmother’s age. My grandmother is still alive and as spry as ever, as are my parents.

So when people say, “How can we still have racism in the year 2014!”, I kind of roll my eyes. Maybe it would make sense to act like the 60s were long ago if the 60s weren’t still in living memory for a good chunk of the population. But we’ve got another couple of decades before that will happen.

10

One of my favorite sayings… “An American thinks 100 years is a long time; an Englishman thinks 100 miles is a long distance.”

11

I’m a bit older than the OP, but I grew up feeling closer to WWII than the Vietnam War which was occurring at that time. My father was 17 when the war ended so he would likely have gone, had the war continued longer. My mother was 10 years old, but their lives were affected much more than Vietnam, which was in some distant place with no real connection. I remember having a conversation with another kid in second grade and he did not believe me, that in fact the US was at war.

Many of my older relatives were WWII vets, as well as my seventh grade art teacher who was deaf in one ear from serving in the artillery.

My grandfather had worked one of the camps where the Japanese were interned during the war. Both parents had grown up with rationing as such so it felt very real for me.

12

My mom was born during WW2, her stepfather fought in it, and my dad had childhood memories of it, and even to them it seemed like another world.

I vote for the rapid changes in the 60s causing that.

13

My grandmother was born 3 years before women’s suffrage was passed, but she laments that there is still sexism in the US. While I can see where a young person might lack perspective in saying “Why is there still in this day and age…” it can also mean “We’ve been fighting for so long…”

It sort of does go three steps forward, two steps back, though, and I think we’ve recently recovered from a “two steps back,” in regard to civil rights, and are just beginning to go forward again, so progress is made, just not in the way we’d like.

Unfortunately, for women born in the 1970s, we were in the middle of a great leap forward in women’s rights, but are going back now, and it’s a bit of a shock. We’ve been going back a while, so we may start going forward again soon, though.

That reminds me of when my cousin, born in Manhattan, but moved to Indiana when she was 11, remarked that New Yorkers think a 30 foot tree is tall, but Hoosiers think a 3 story building is tall.

14

My mother was born in the '50s, and she’s mentioned to me that it surprised her as a school-aged kid to realize how recently WWII had been – even though her own father was a WWII veteran. I think this was probably partially because the 1960s were so different from the 1940s (or at least movies from the 1940s) and partially because to a young child a year or two might seem like a long time.

I know that as I’ve gotten old my idea of what counts as “a long time ago” has changed. I was born in the early '80s, and tend to think of my teenage years in the 1990s as being NOT a long time ago…regardless of how much time has passed since then. In 1994 I would have considered 1974 kind of a long time ago. My parents hadn’t even met at that point. The Vietnam War was still going on. Music from that era was definitely “classic rock”. But the 20 years between 1994 and now seems like a much shorter period of time to me personally, although I assume that to many teenagers today 1994 is practically ancient history. (That was before 9/11! They barely even had the Web then!)

Seeing WWI depicted in period pieces like Downton Abbey and the recent centennial of the beginning of that war has made me think about how long ago WWI is now. It’s always seemed like a long time ago to me, but when I was a kid there must have been plenty of WWI veterans still alive and even more people who’d been children during the war. They were old, with the veterans being in their 80s or 90s, but they were still around even if many of them were living in nursing homes. A couple of years ago (inspired by Downton Abbey) I looked online to see if there were any WWI vets still alive. There were just a couple then, and looking at Wikipedia just now I see that the last of them have since passed away. There must be some elderly people left with childhood memories of the war, but even they would have to be at least 100. Within the next decade or so there won’t be anyone left alive with personal memories of WWI.

15

Yup. My grandmother was born in 1917, and is 97. She has no personal awareness of WWI, because she was too young, but heard lots of stories, and knew vets.

I remember July 4th parades where the WWII vets marched, and they were old, but not ancient, and would shake people’s hands, and toss candy to the kids. There’d be WWI vets following. Many of them were being pushed in wheelchairs, not because they used a wheelchair every day, but just because they couldn’t keep up with the whole parade route otherwise. They were really old. Most of them were friendly, and would wave to people. Usually someone would drive a convertible with several WWI vets (a 60s era convertible with two front seat passengers, and three or four back seat passengers). A lot of these guys would be in their uniforms. The WWII vets would wear medals and VFW hats, but didn’t fit into their uniforms, having gotten fatter. The WWI vets had gotten thin with old age the way people, and could get back into their uniforms.

There usually weren’t Vietnam vets in the parade, that I remember, even though no one discouraged it. By the time I was old enough to remember, the war was over, but Vietnam vets had been “burned” with their unwelcoming homecomings, and weren’t eager to relive them marching in parades.

The last parade I went to, the VFW marched together, not in separate units depending on what war they’d been in, so you could make a rough guess by age who was a Vietnam vet, but a young enlisted man in Korea might be the same age as an officer from Vietnam, and the vets from the different Iraq wars blended together.

I think it’s true that only a small percentage of people, I could even say “men” are war vets, and that’s with OIF still pretty recent. But in the 1950s, nearly every healthy man, and quite a lot of women were WWII vets. In a very real sense “America” fought WWII. OIF was fought pretty much by the people who were in the military deployed in Iraq, and to a lesser extent their families, not by “America,” and I say that as the wife of an OIF vet.

16

You are talking about the centennial of WW1. When I was growing up it was the centennial of the Civil War. And the last old soldier had died in 1959. I felt that was a long, long time ago. Now I was born only 39 years after the end of WW1. I do not feel that old right now.

17

Star Wars is older now than The Wizard of Oz was when I was born, and that makes me feel old.

I do remember something that happened recently that really gave me a jolt, though. In the 1990s, and some time relatively late, like 96 or 97, the last manufacturer of shoes for women with bound feet ceased operation in China. Made me sad and glad at the same time.

My father’s brother married into a Holocaust survivor family, and this is the aunt and uncle who pretty much raised me, so it makes the Holocaust very relevant and immediate for me, but somehow, does not make WWII seem less long ago. I don’t know why.

18

The movie home alone is closer in time to the moon landing than we are to the release of that movie. 1969, 1990, 2014.

Also whenever someone talks about ‘the last decade’ personally I think they are talking about the 90s, not the aughts. It is like my brain skipped the 2000-2010 period.

19

Cool, you are reflecting the same feelings even closer to the event, so it’s not just me.

Nope, I don’t think that there was any purposeful misleading. Rather, it was a kind of systematic, unconscious misleading. It was just sort of in the culture and in the media, in ways mostly subtle.

Those are good questions. In the 1980s, those things also seemed rather distant for the same “in the water reasons,” even though intellectually I knew they were not (not as distant as WWII). It was as if people wanted to put Watergate behind them, and that created a similar “Wall of Time.” However, your son may not have experienced that artificial Wall of Time.

20

Absolutely, great points. It has occurred to me before that the oldest person still living could have been in the presence of someone who could have known or been in the presence of Napoleon, George Washington, etc. I think the oldest person now is 116 or so, and there were 100-year-olds back in 1898, so that gets us back to 1798.