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I'm the age to have known plenty of the actual 'war generation' in my life. They were my parents - my aunts and uncles - even political leaders. The thing that always came across was the damage of it all. The hard cost of the good things that followed. /1
Peace was a gift to those who came after. Youth culture, free health, white technological heat. No crawling from rubble, like my own mother. No bleeding out on a French beach, like my father. The luxury of consumer distractions, and a pension at the end of it. /2
A baby boom born to privileges unknown to their parents. And their response? An armchair fetishising of their parents suffering. A bar-room, comic book, coward's bravado - horror turned into cheap political language by careerists who never had lives touched by real suffering. /3
A disgusting spit into my father's face from a generation of spoilt, overgrown children. The pompous spouting of the ignorant and the compassion-starved. The tinkering with national disaster like it was a child's toy. Their blood gift, stamped on in a boom-babies' final tantrum.
I share the shame of all of those elderly veterans of that post-war boom who can still muster the humility and dignity to remember what the real gift was, and why. And who feel our betrayal of the next generations deeply. Our selfishness is now their burden. /end
