My dad said something interesting as I was looking at apartments overseas.
"We have had it too easy in America, and we've gotten soft as a culture. The places you are looking have had real trouble and huge changes and struggles in living memory - they are more careful to guard democracy."
I have never heard the "gotten soft" thing turned around like that by a boomer. It's true, though. The places I am looking have had major political upheaval in the memory of his generation at least, and the last real struggle for justice, fairness, and democracy we've felt as a holistic nation (and not just activists or veterans like me) was WWII in a lot of ways. Most of those veterans are gone, now.
The collective memory loss is really scary as a global trend. We have to get better at teaching history.
@hacks4pancakes the timing of this is not a surprise. I don't know how many service members from ww2 are still here, but they are vanishing few and don't have media platforms. Every generation needs to learn from historical accounts or abject failure that leads to world War to understand what fascism actually is. I hope we avert it
@XenoDangerEvil @hacks4pancakes I'm from the Netherlands, and people from my generation (40ies/50ies) are still damaged because their grandparent(s) collaborated with the Germans ("NSB"). That kind of thing lingers on, causing social, emotional and cultural damage that gets handed down for generations.
Not only that, people still know who's family was on the wrong side ~80 years later, and the archives about the aftermath are only now slowly opening up, because it is still so sensitive.
With fascism, nobody wins.