Opaque Lucidity

The Foothold

Most of you reading this know at least something about D-Day, which took place today in 1944. It wasn’t really the first foothold for the Allies in Europe because troops were already fighting up the boot of Italy and the Soviets were pushing through from the east. Soviet historians barely paid attention to the invasion of Normandy because, to their way of thinking, it was a sideshow compared to their operations to liberate the Fatherland. But to the western Allies, D-Day was an enormous operation and marked the beginning of the end for Nazi control of Europe.

Sixty-four years have gone by since that “rendezvous with destiny” (General Eisenhower’s words) took place. A man who was 18 and getting shot at by Germans (or an 18 year old shooting at Allied troops) would be 82 now, a few years beyond the life expectancy of males in the US and western Europe. These men are dying at the rate of one thousand a day. Put simply, most of us will live to see the day when everyone who fought in the Second World War will be dead.

This saddens me tremendously. It’s not just the loss of a great generation that bothers me; rather, it is the loss of living history and the fact that it will assign yet another formative event to the paper of history texts. When The Lovely Kelli was student teaching earlier this year, she quickly learned that most of the kids she taught (sophomores and juniors) have no relation to the events of the past 230 years. Basically, anything that happened before 1991 is irrelevant.

Some of these kids will develop a love of history as adults but, sadly, many will never take the time to learn about the sacrifices made by previous generations of Americans. I believe it is always dangerous when a people forget their past as a society. Our people-elected government and our rights did not just happen. If we ever forget that, we will truly become a nation in decline.