http://www.independent.com/news/2010/jun/23/endangered-wisdom/

Long live a free ocea!

“Over the past 40 years children have been programmed by their own parents to believe that you can d*ck around for four years in a university, and not only will that diploma somehow enable you to earn more money than a plumber or an electrician, but more importantly, that diploma will make you a better, more enlightened, more well rounded person than a plumber or an electrician.”

My goodness, how right you are! My parents-in-law, neither of whom went past high school in the late 1940s/early 1950s, are among the wisest and most capable people I know. My father in law can fix anything mechanical, a natural engineer. Their small town is full of people like that.

As a society, we’ve lost sight of the fact that there are many wellsprings of knowledge, not simply books. Scholarly learning has its place, but certain kinds of knowing aren’t accessible that way, and can only be learned by doing, by getting dirty, by rolling up your sleeves and getting to it – whatever it is! Our current President typifies this problem; he is a scholar – a very bright one, but knows only that, and nothing else. Therefore he lacks concrete knowledge of reality – the kind that cannot be learned in the library or behind the lectern, and is therefore deficient in wisdom.

Farmers, anyone who works with their hands, seem to acquire a certain type of view of reality – maybe that’s one reason VDH’s writing is so insightful, that he was (is?) a farmer.

However, I would with you that perhaps the ‘greatest generation’ – the Depression/WW2 generation – has been over-rated in many respects. If any generation deserves that title, it is the generation of patriots comprising the Founding Fathers, the men who gave birth to this nation, in the process writing our Declaration of Independence and Constitution, the Federalist papers, and many other landmark works.

As Dinesh D’Souza writes, the acheivements of the WWII generation, though impressive in many ways, were lacking in one significant way: they failed to reproduce themselves; that is, they failed to transmit their values to the following generation.

You are also partly correct that the WWII generation ‘lost’ the Vietnam War, as the war effort was largely led by politicians and officers of that time. Bear in mind that the war, we now know, was won for all intents and purposes on the battlefield after the Tet Offensive. Although we didn’t know it at the time, the Vietcong were effectively destroyed as a fighting force, and the regular NVA sustained terrific damage. However, Walter Cronkite effectively slammed the door on our efforts by unilaterally declaring the war effectively unwinable. We also had the N. Vietnamese on the ropes during the “Rolling Thunder” strategic bombing offensive of the early 1970s, but again let the intiative slip away. These were, it can argued, political and not military failures. The Communists won the war only after we’d left the scene, so it is accurate to state that we did not lose the war, the S. Vietnamese government did. If one argues that we ‘lost’ the war by failing to achieve our strategic aims, then one shouldn’t blame every senior U.S. officer, many of whom were gravely troubled by how the war was being prosecuted. Moreover, our best military people in Vietnam were the equal of anyone, anywhere – bar none. For every William Westmoreland, there were men like Creighton Abrams, or David Hackworth, or Hal Moore. Vietnam was a new kind of war, one any nation would have had trouble winning. And make no mistake, we could have ended that war with the push of a button. What I find remarkable about that conflict is that after all the suffering sustained by our uniformed services, we still in the end exercised some degree of restraint and did not use tactical nukes.
The fact that we didn’t not use nuclear weapons says something about the basic good sense and decency of the American people and – yes – even our leaders, who had the sense not to risk a wider war by using these ultimate weapons.

Thanks for your service…