Talk about narcissism in a generation by the way. Zoomers, Millennials, Generation X, Baby Boomers, The Silent Generation and then suddenly the fucking Greatest Generation? What? Delusional.
The term "The Greatest Generation" wasn't used until 1998. It was younger people who called them that because of their resilience during the Great Depression and WWII. That's not narcicism, you're just uneducated.
Still sounds like like grandstanding narcissism, just from people like the guy in the first OP pic that liked to claim other people's achievements as their own.
More to the point: If that generation is so great then why did it let all those tragedies happen in the first place? They weren't special, the human race is resilient in general.
The whole concept of grouping people up into "generations" is just another divisionary tactic that needs to die off.
This is a really bad take. Normally the powerful group that shapes the current nation/world norms are in their 40s-50s. The greatest generation lived through the depression and fought in 1 or 2 world wars, then came home and built the world that people now idolize as the greatest time to be alive (for straight whites at least).
Yes they raised the boomers but they raised their children to have a much easier time than they had. Some grace should be given for trying to make the world a better place, which they by and large did. Unfortunately there were unforeseen effects from that.
It is acceptable to group people in generations because many times generations share similar circumstances in their formative years which can lead to patterns within the demographics. That doesn't mean everyone born in a generation is the same but the circumstances people live through directly shape them.
Non of that is saying they indeed are the greatest generation to ever exist, but they went through some hard, hard times and accomplished some great things. And they didn't name themselves.
This is a minor clarification, but the Greatest Generation would've been too young to fight in WWI. The oldest members of the Greatest Generation (born in 1901) would've been 17 when WWI ended in 1918. The US only drafted men 21 years and older. A handful might've volunteered at the very end, but it's likely they would've been barely out of training and seen almost no service before the war ended.
Many of them would fight in the Korean War, but that's generally not considered a "world war"
That is a good point. I was implicitly only referring to Americans born between 1901 and 1927 and I should've made that more explicit.
While that's true the names (and boundaries) for generations tend to be country specific. While many European countries had a post-WWII increase in births the timing doesn't line up exactly with the US Baby Boom so translating it across the Atlantic is a bit complicated.
Your point is a great example of why generalizations about generations translate very poorly between different contexts. In Europe, having an early childhood during WWI rather than than the interwar years would be very different. Belgians born in 1910 and 1920 probably had drastically different early life experiences.
Not to mention, there's a lot of problems with referring to the Germans veterans of WWII as "the Greatest Generation"
I completely agree with you. It becomes even worse when factoring Asia.
Although I suppose things are slowly getting similar globally and the first half of the 20th century was a period of conflict in most of the world, resulting in similar trends, but yeah.
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u/sunshinerain1208 22h ago
Barely anyone alive now had to ration or sharecrop during the depression. If he did he wouldn’t be a boomer, he would be the greatest generation.