Day 25: What decade do you think you should have been born in?

*In what decade do you think you should have been born?*

I am really trying to fix my grammar and not end sentences in prepositions. It is a work in progress.

Anyway, despite the grammatical errors...I love this question. I LOVE LOVE LOVE this question. Because, oddly enough, this is something to which I have given a lot of thought. And I feel my answer is far from traditional.

While I obviously was born in the correct decade, because otherwise I wouldn't be here to answer this question and wouldn't have the fabulous life I currently live, I think it would have been GLORIOUS to live in the 1940s. But, to make it work properly, I would need to be born in the 1920s to actually live the 1940s. I think the individuals who lived during this era of American history were more resourceful and hard-working than any other generation. And yes, I truly believe they are the "Greatest Generation," as Tom Brokaw so aptly penned. I know there are many historians who feel this particular generation is overrated and had just as many issues as we do today, but I simply disagree. I KNOW they had more issues than we do today...and they were much bigger issues. A global conflict in which a large portion of our youthful population was annihilated seems like a bigger issue to me than obesity and the indoor-epidemic. I am pretty sure most of our young men nowadays would have no idea how to manage manual labor and the conditions in which the young men in the 1940s were forced to survive. In no way do I think they were "overrated."

I used to think it would be cool to live in the era of the 1940s because of the hairstyles, the cars, the clothes, the music, the movies, etc. But after years of hearing my grandmother's stories about the Depression and how many young men from her high school class were killed during the war, I realized the decade was a lot more than just the glamorous Hollywood stylization. Nowadays, in my older and wiser years, I simply feel like I missed out on something big. The generation that sparked the baby boom is rapidly declining, with something like 10,000 deaths per day in the United States, and I feel like they have so much more to tell. They came of age during the Great Depression and World War II, and lived through challenges and horrors that we will never experience.

We would all do well to take some pages from the books of these elders; they created a prosperous and powerful United States and it has deteriorated rapidly ever since.