All my life, people have wanted to be young, young, YOUNG!

With the Weakest Generation, this obsession with youth began to become a cult. You who did not live through their era will not know it as well as BBG and I do, but unless a WWII vet had been a big success in real life, his biggest days ended when he was a very young.

A lot of people say that their kin never talked about the War. As a writer, that doesn’t impress. What a writer does is write what an audience wants to read, so the fact that a writer came up with the title “The Greatest Generation” means that that was exactly what they wanted to hear and were happy to pay for.

It is true that after WWII a lot of veterans were known as the Silent Generation. They did not want to talk about the War. That is because they remembered it. But the most horrible memories, the first-hand ones, fade, unless you have mental problems.

When your parents die, you no longer weep only at any mention of them only a year later.

In fact, by 1960 every WWII vet had seen so many movies about the uniform heroism of WWII and how every GI could take on a Nazi Division with his gun jammed that there was no real memory at all. The life of a real family man who made a living and raised a family had been reduced in the public mind to a dull routine.

So they began to worship themselves as youths.

This was a fertile ground for hippiedom to develop..

There were genuine hippies, but they are not a shadow in history. The hippies we know about were political lefties. To them the WWII generation had done one good thing, which was to save Stalin and give one third of the human race to the Reds.

They did their bit by carrying all those Viet Cong flags in their Peace Marches.

The Youth Cult, Don’t Trust Anyone Over 30, was wildly popular with the media.

Of course, the VFW was largely known as anti-hippie, but respectable conservatives are known as real opponents of the left. This didn’t fool me when I was a kid.

The VFW insisted that when THEY were young they were Brave Warriors, and the new ones were shirkers.

But it was a situation much like today’s liberals and respectable conservative. Both sides agreed on an essential

This essential was that both VFW and Leftists hippies agreed that youth is everything.

Every other generation had considered youth had its place, but maturity was the status a man was most productive in. It has been three generations since we have considered the ultimate loss to be a person who does not MATURE.

This has been a major part of the failure of the Weakest Generation and those it spawned to mature.

It is also the reason no one notices it.