B. U. G. S.

Everything I write ends up relating to something else I write.

The piece below probably strikes my readers as gushy, but there was something I wanted to say there, and it wasn’t just about women.

Of all things, it relates to the bane of my life, the World War II Generation.

The Greatest Generation fought a War.

Now the problem with the group that calls itself The Greatest Generation is not that they have an inflated opinion of themselves. That a normal fault in human beings.

The problem with what I call the Weakest Generation relates directly to something else I keep writing about:

1) As Oliver Hardy said, “There is nothing as DUMB as a dumb mad who thinks he’s smart.”

2) I have repeatedly said that the disaster with professors is not that they are bigoted and oppressive, but that they believe sincerely that they are the only truly objective and unprejudice profession on earth.

Nobody is as provincial as the Southener who is trying desperately to be sophisticated.

3) The most sadistic Inquisitors were the ones who did not do it for gain, but believed they were doing it all for Christ.

4) The disaster with professors comes from their absolutely unshakable belief that their bigotry is the opposite of bigotry.

And so forth.

Being silly is one thing. But when someone simply cannot be convinced that he is anything but Righteousness Incarnate in the area in which he is being silly, he has given himself a license to kill.

The Weakest Generation went from being silly to destroying everything I care about simply because no one ever brought them up short.

The Weakest Generation was told, over and over, that they had shown all the courage they ever needed to show by fighting the War. When tyrants came along and told them to let their daughters dance with blacks or screaming Jews occupied the university campuses in the 1960s, real Americans would have, “We won’t STAND for this!”

What did The Weakest Generation say? I know it by heart. I heard it every time there was a moral crisis and the Weakest Generation broke and ran:

“Well, you young people have to fight your own battles. Look at me! I FOUGHT IN WORLD WAR II and you didn’t!”

They had fought their battle, they had proved their courage. It was up to everybody else to fight the moral war that has been the history of the last sixty years.

Sixty years of breaking and running because they fought a war!

So when I praise the routine couage and self-sacrifice of women, I am focusing on the 99.99% of the human race which was NOT part of the Weakest Generation.

The wren who pretends to have a broken wing to get the fox away from her chicks would have gotten at least a silver star in World War II.

Let me give you another one of THOUSANDS of examples. At the end of World War I the entire Western world suffered from a flu pandemic. Millions died, probably more than died in the War, all in one year.

Thank God that flu did not occur at the end of World War II! The Weakest Generation would have said, “I just got back from fighting a WAR. I’m not going to risk my life at the bedside of somebody with flu. YOU show your courage for a change.”

Nobody had any idea where this sudden murderous epidemic had come from, and this was long after the Middle Ages when deadly pandemics were not so rare.

This was new and it was terrifying.

And one of the thousands of untold stories of heroism in history is about the men, and more WOMEN, who were right there ministering to people they knew could kill them.

I was raised with that generation, too.

And I never heard ONE of them brag about it.

Practically nobody has even HEARD of it.

Of twelve million American men in uniform in WORLD WAR II, about one in three ever HEARD a hostile shot fired. The number of people in a smaller America who risked their lives in the flu pandemic was a lot more than four million.

As I say, this is one of THOUSANDS of examples in history.

The fatal disease of the Weakest Generation was that thought they were uniquely courageous so they never showed courage again.

The real curse of mankind is dumb people who think they are smart, hopeless provincials who think they are being sophisticated when they follow a cut-out pattern that Harvard or New York tells them will make them sophisticated, professors who INCURABLY think their bigotry is the only true tolerance.

And the moral cowards who truly believe they are Courage Incarnate.