What Would We Give?     
    
   Miami Herald columnist Leonard Pitts - his D-Day column inspires our third and final blog on the 75th anniversary remembrance.

   "How the nation has changed..." he begins. Mr. Pitts focuses on "connectedness," which "is more than mobile phones and social media. It is also about the investment each one makes in a common us..."

   During the war, "...that connectedness made people save scrap metal and bacon grease, grow their own food, ration gas, buy war bonds and go without," he writes. "On D-Day, companies took out newspaper ads exhorting people to go to their churches or synagogues and pray..." 

   "Thoughts and prayers...has become a cliche," he says. "Yet, there is ... the assumption that the same burdens, hopes and faith were borne by all." 

   Pitts recalls Tom Brokaw's book, The Greatest Generation. Whether they were that or not, "...they were a generation that courageously faced the nation's greatest existential threat since the Civil War." 

   "Back home, families huddled around radios or snatched up newspapers, hungry for news. They were not a perfect generation. But they knew ... how to be a country - what it took, what it meant, and why it mattered." 

   "They pulled together and believed in something more important to them than their own lives. They were bound to one another, connected in ways unachievable by social media. We might find this difficult to imagine," he writes, "but we owe it to our country to try." 

   "History demanded of them an answer," Pitts writes: What would you give to save your world?" 

~ ~ ~

   The WWII years were an extension of the Depression. That and generally more faith may explain "connectedness." Plus, the "sneak" attack on Pearl Harbor resonated with most Americans until justice was satisfied in August 1945. Enormous changes have occurred here and around the world since the war. Without a serious threat, there seems to be a severe disconnect among us.     

      Jimmy