The 2016 presidential election will be a massive watershed in terms of generational change among voters - one few pundits yet recognize.
Even the youngest of the once all mighty Greatest Generation will be over 75 and as we all should know, over-75s simply don't turn out to vote like those 55-75 do.
The Greatest Generation and their children (the Transitional "Boomer" Generation) have always differed the most over their varying "memories" of WWII.
No boomer ever has any direct personal memories of WWII as WWII, even if born during the war -- just too young.
But even someone born in 1939 has enough memories of the Home Front side of WWII to feel part of its triumphalist glow.
That is all that most of today's Greatest Generation voters remembers of WWII - the Home Front propaganda victories rather than the darker truth revealed out there on the front lines.
Because by November 2016, almost all still living WWII vets must be very near ninety or older - much older.
And thus hardly a big part of the voting pool.
Boomers and their parents both know (in their hearts) that the government, military, media, business and science lied repeatedly to the voters during WWII.
But only the Greatest Generation heard these lies first hand and bought into them, mostly.
To ever publicly admit that their wartime government lied is to admit that they themselves were lied to and were fools for buying it.
Few of us like to ever publicly admit we were fools.
In their hearts they know its true, but publicly - above all to their kids - the Greatest Generation finds it very hard to admit that all the powerful (and once fully trusted institutions) of WWII systemically lied to them.
This generation is still the one most likely to 'back our troops right or wrong', to trust that the big people in government 'know things we little people don't' etc.
This generation has been the conservatives' best friend.
But now their much more ornery kids are the key voting demographic --- and they don't take kindly to bull and cant ...
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Why My Urgency ?
- Michael Marshall
- Nova Scotia
- Histories of WWII all start with the presumption that it was a war raged between humans and human ideologies, with Nature’s climate and geography as side issues easily surmounted.My blog, on the contrary will only accept that it was conflict between humans and their ideology that STARTED the war but that it was the barriers thrown up by Mother Nature (geography & climate) that turned it into a war that lasted between 6 to 15 years and expanded to thoroughly involve all the world’s oceans and continents. High Modernity may have started the war convinced that Nature had been conquered and was about to be soon replaced by human Synthetic Autarky and that only human Tiger tanks and human Typhoon planes were to be feared. But by the end, more and more people had lost their naive faith in Scientism and were beginning to accept that humanity was thoroughly entangled with both the Nature of plants, animals & microbes as well as the Nature of so called “lesser” humanity. By 1965, the world was definitely entering the Age of Entanglement. Billions still believed - at least in part -with the promises of High Modernity but intellectually & emotionally, it was no longer dominant...
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