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First they grew up in the Depression, which involved mountains and mountains of traumatic dislocation and loss.
Then Hitler and Hirohito showed up to inflict yet more traumatic dislocation and loss.
Looking back on my own father with what I know now, I see someone who was so traumatized, all he could do was drink and rage.
The trauma of the Depression and WWII left terrible marks on the parents of the boomers that ended up leaving marks on the boomers, too.
We in the boomer generation had to grow up under the shadow cast by our parents' post traumatic outlook towards the world.
This post-traumatic outlook held by the WWII generation in America, Europe and the USSR had a lot to do with enabling and giving power to the paranoid excesses of the Cold War on both sides of the Iron Curtain.
That was the generation, after all, that thought Mutually Assured Destruction was an acceptable way to live.
