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Don’t Forget! You Saw it in the
Adverti$$er
August 2022 #14277 Page #62
From the Road... Please Not Another “Back in the Day” Story!
By Thomas McAnally President TheJobLine.com
W
hen I was young, the last thing I wanted to hear from my dad was “you don’t have much to complain about, back in my day....” Whatever it was, I was sure it had been embellished. Mom was much simpler, “Because I said so”. As I got older, I started to realize they were probably right, I was complaining about things their generation would have considered a joke.
What I learned later in life is that the “Greatest Generation” dealt with unimaginable issues that my and subsequent generations never considered possible. From the Great Depression to World Wars, in a time that the government had no safety nets, many suffered and learned to deal with it. Charity was from the church, not the government. Many were left to deal on their own, many died as a result. My dad, part of the Greatest Generation, was in the 82nd Airborne in WWII. He was in the battle of Normandy, not on the beaches but behind enemy lines prior to D-Day as part of small units that harassed the enemy day and night before the invasion began. I have no doubt that my generation (think Vietnam) and the generations that followed (Iraq, Afghanistan, and others) had to go through similar horrors, but with more support and better resources than in WWII. My dad never told me about these things, including having a bayonet wound while he soldiered on for weeks. I had to learn them from uncles and family. His generation did not talk about their problems. No Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, or Messenger. While the term PTSD hadn’t been coined, shell shock was real, and many suffered as a result of battlefield trauma. Today, there are many names for different ailments caused by battlefield injury, both mental and physical. The Department of Veterans Affairs is better equipped to manage these issues than back in the 1940s and 1950s. Still, we have too many homeless veterans, and veterans with untreated PTSD and mental illness. We have so many social programs for almost anything that can rate a Facebook page, but not enough attention is placed on veterans who served, bled, and were ravaged while doing their duty. We can do better. Back home, the Greatest Generation had other challenges, like the Great Depression. Having lived on a farm, my mom told stories about how they always had gas, diesel, and tires for the equipment, as the family farm fed America’s war effort. They got rationing coupons for shoes and pretty much everything else. As one of 8 kids, everything was passed down, fixed, and passed down again until it wasn’t usable. Kids in the US and other developed countries only wear torn or worn clothes now if it’s fashionable to purchase them that way. Continued next page
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