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A little bit like Colin Kaepernick rolling out against Wagner and Irvin? ... sorry ...
No, the suffering in WWI was simply mind-numbing. Not all the kiddies here realize that there were a lot of baseball legends, such as Christy Mathewson, who sacrificed their careers and lives in order that others might enjoy the blessings of freedom. A Hey Bill today:
"It's just that a big, big gap developed between the ways that we thought about the world and the way that older people thought about the world. You can't really explain it to young people, because so many of the accepted beliefs of older generations have almost disappeared, and it's hard to get people to understand what it was like." Would you be willing to try? I'm in my 20's and have very little knowledge of how previous generations differed.
Asked by: izzy24
Answered: 8/12/2015
Well, I'll do what I can with the limitations of my attention span. Our parents generation saw the world as a very tough place, and believed to the core of their being that one had to BE tough to make it in the world. You had to behave yourself; you had to follow the rules; even the liberals tended to see the world this way. They had been raised in (a) the depression, which was economic hard times far beyond what we can understand, and (b) World War II. . .and even before then, they had been raised by parents for generations who believed in toughness. Child rearing manuals into the 1930s generally stressed the importance of punishing misbehavior. Spanking children shouldn't begin until the child was 8 months old; that was actual advice. Children should be potty trained when they were three months old; if it didn't take by the time the child was six or eight months old, then it was time to introduce spanking into the potty training program.. What was "punishment" then would be "child abuse" now--serious child abuse. If somebody insulted you, you confronted him. If it came to blows, it came to blows; so what? If the Russians got out of line, you had to fight them. People had to learn to take care of themselves. Women were supposed to do women's things--cooking, cleaning, taking care of the house--and men were supposed to do men's things, like earning money and fighting wars. x x x x x x x As children, we were force-fed more toughness than we had any actual need for. About 1963, 1965 we all decided that we didn't really NEED to be so damned tough. We adopted a values system based on kindness, acceptance, enjoyment of life and trust, rather than toughness, hard work, correct behavior and self-reliance. It wasn't a perfect system, either; acceptance runs casually into laziness, enjoyment of life into self-indulgence, and trust into naivete, but then, the old system wasn't perfect, either. We basically rejected almost everything that our parents believed in, or at least it seemed that way. Our parents were racists, most of them, and we couldn't tolerate that or forgive that. Our parents insulted men who wore long hair and beards, so we all wore long hair and beards. I sense that I'm not really reaching an explanation here that will make sense. . . .There is a stanza from a Merle Haggard Song that summarizes pretty well the problem. " I read about some squirrely guy,/Who claims, he just don't believe in fightin'./An' I wonder just how long,/The rest of us can count on bein' free./They love our milk an' honey,/But they preach about some other way of livin'./When they're runnin' down my country, hoss,/They're walkin' on the fightin' side of me." The assumption is that those who have different values from the mainstream values are "squirrely guys", and they need to be set straight or they endanger all of us. That was the dominant mindset of that generation--that those who did not conform, those who did not buy in, were a danger to all of us, and therefore they must be ridiculed, excluded, beaten if necessary and forced to conform. x x xx But, to complete the story fairly. . .once the values of MY generation became the dominant values, we became every bit as intolerant as our parents were. Perhaps we were ALWAYS intolerant, I don't know. I don't think so. But certainly by 1985, 1990 we had become as intolerant of out-of-the-mainstream values as we ever were; it was just that different values were out of the mainstream.