I Wasn't Alive During World War II

I woke up, that Tuesday morning, about 8 am (CST). I remember getting up and brushing my teeth then going to Zac's room (I lived at a fraternity house; I was a sophomore in college) to watch a little Sportscenter before I showered and headed to class. When I got to Zac's room, he did not have Sportscenter on. Maybe he had ESPN on, but what was on his TV was not sports. It was calamity.
Later that afternoon, full of rage, I drove with a pledge brother to the recruiting station in town to enlist. It was closed, and I later calmed down and decided to finish college. 
A few months later, I remember watching the Super Bowl with a bunch of friends and the Rams fans in the room were complaining that "this thing is fixed...like they'll let a team named "THE PATRIOTS" lose after 9/11!"

You know, I was born in 1982. World War II was 40 years in the past. Vietnam was more than a decade ago. American culture had, to be sure, been fundamentally shaped by these two events. But not me. I never sat glued to a radio listening to Roosevelt, never watched Nixon disappear into that helicopter.
This disconnection from the past's current events is evident in my continued call for catharsis at NASA. I never watched Neil Armstrong walk on the Moon and so he is not a hero to me. In my lifetime, Neil Armstrong has been a wizened public figure from a bygone era constantly begging the Federal government for more Moon missions, and nothing more. Sure, the stories of my grandfather, navigator in a B-25 during WWII are thrilling and interesting. But they are someone else's stories.

My daughter was born on October 25, 2007. As such, she will never know the feeling of sitting in a room expecting to see the highlights from Monday Night Football on TV only to find images of New York City in ruin. It will all be disconnected from her, part of her cultural heritage but not part of her personal psyche.

And that's probably for the best. I seriously doubt any parent or grandparent actively wishes their progeny would better understand them by having suffered the same terrible epochs of human history that they had to endure.
If anything, I wish that no terrible event will occur during my daughter's lifetime. This is not because I wish to spare her the awful feelings of confusion and rage I felt that terrible day and the days afterward. It is because once you have suffered your lens gets cloudy and the objectivity you previously enjoyed is forever gone. When my child looks back on the first decade of the new millennium, I want her to be critical of us. I don't want her to empathize and say "well, you had suffered, so the torture of detainees, the keeping people in secret prisons and refusal to let them see lawyers, the waterboarding, the drone attacks on American citizens, the illegal hacking of people's phones and email, the racism towards American muslims, the hyped up but obviously porous security, the radicalization of the Right and complacency of the Left, and the Empire-building interventionism are understandable." I don't want her to understand. I want her to look me in the face and ask my why I didn't do more to calm people down. Why I got swept up in the post-9/11 fervor like everyone else. I won't have an answer for her, other than "I was young, and stupid."

What's your excuse?


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