Wrote this a few years ago, but hey it’s D-Day and the post seems appropriate…
1910 you’re born. you spend the next 8 years dodging death-dealing whooping cough, mumps and measles
1918 the spanish flu sweeps the world killing 5% of the world’s population. You survive but nearly die when a small scratch from jumping a fence causes a wide spread infection. Your teenage years see your best friend succumb to polio.
1929 you’re one of the 30% who graduate high school but the Great Depression crashes through America and you spend the next decade hopping rail cars, moving from town to town taking any job you can. The jobs that exist are few and far between and they always demand back breaking physical labor.
1941 you’ve finally carved out a niche working a semi-skilled profession in the shipyards when Hirohito’s forces attack Pearl Harbor.
The early 40’s are spent in places like the Kasserine Pass, Palermo, and Messina. You step off a Higgins boat onto Omaha Beach in ’44, force your way through France’s hedgerow country and hunker down in a small town called Bastogne.
It’s 1945 the Axis is defeated, and you are only 35 years old forged in a crucible of circumstance and character. America bestrides the world a burgeoning economic colossus amidst a cohort of also-rans and 90-pound weaklings.
The next 35 years is your Dominion…
1980 you’re born as Atari is sweeping America. You spend the first ten years worried about nothing more than getting strep throat and which game playing platform you’ll get for Christmas. The USA experience decades long economic growth.
1990 the First Gulf war, or the Video Game War as its also called, lands in your consciousness. It lasts 100 hours and is gone.
The 1990‘s the Internet arrives and your world moves online.
2001 you’re a Junior at State College when the Towers come down.
As soldiers fight, America’s growth moves forward unhindered.
2008 the American economy shudders. You shudder as well when your job as a business rep for a home improvement retailer disappears. You spend the next two years unemployed.
2012 you work a series of part time jobs as Europe slips into a Depression brought on by immense debt, gargantuan personal entitlement and individual ennui that reaches so deep that people can’t be bothered, nor desire, to have children.
America faces a Baby Boom generation that’s siphoning away vast mountains of cash to pay for its sunset years, economic competition from a vast assemblage of new countries, while owing one major competitor in China a trillion dollars, and finally fanatics proclaiming Jihad in the Middle East.
You are 35 years old constructed through a fun house mirror of reality tv, xbox, credit card debt, and vast panoply of technological distractions.
The next 35 years is your drawn out demise.
@Andy For those of us who are diabetic and using ozempic to lower our A1C it’s isn’t always a picnic and party of weight loss . The drug is a life saver .