generation before them, which lived through maybe the most tumultuous and horrific period in modern history, especially in Europe and parts of Asia. Those poor people had it rough.

If you were a young man born in the 1880s or 1890s, especially in most of Europe or one of its colonies or dominions, you probably ended up fighting for several years in World War I (1914-18), the bloodiest war ever to that point, and maybe the most pointless major war ever. If you survived it, you then went through the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918-19, which killed maybe 50-80 million people globally.

If you survived the war and the pandemic, you got a bit of a break for a decade or so, in most of the world (not so much in places like Russia or Germany or, if you were black, the Jim Crow South). But then came the Great Depression in 1929, bringing a decade of grinding poverty to many millions. Then, in 1939, came World War II. Many of the men who survived WWI were too old to fight in this one, but most of them had children who did have to fight, and everyone had to try to live through it. By the time the war ended, you would have lived through 3 decades of almost perpetual war, disease, and economic devastation.

All of this happened in a period of about 30 years (1914-45). If I think back to 31 years ago, to 1993, it doesn’t seem so long ago. I can’t imagine having had to live through all that during such a short timespan.