The Best Years of Our Lives

I started to watch the movie by the same title as this blog but got teary eyed when Fredric March was welcomed home by his wife and kids. The movie was on when Sherry called and had talked to Josh. He told her that he had just talked to Jacob, and Whitney was still talking to him. He told them he was going on another mission. This was really deflating since he had insinuated that he was going to be in Kuwait for the duration of his time which is less than three weeks. Shit. No wonder politics is based in the "lizard brain", it takes emotion to make it real.

I've always had some odd fascination for the time period during which this movie was made. This particular movie touches that fascination because it portrays the essence of that era, at least to me. It came at the end of a global conflict which defined the boundary of the Industrial Age and the Information Age. While Industrialism continued apace after the war, it was coming to a great hissing end because the Information Age reached across political boundaries like kudzu, covering up everything. The most destructive weapon developed during the war, the atomic bomb, forced the birth of the first binary computers, and the mobilization of legions of brilliant scientists matched the mobilization of armies. At the end the victors stood looking over a wasteland of military strategy, diplomatic failures, economic disaster, and human suffering. But, because their victory came because of their superior ability to mobilize immense resources after crushing defeats, they saw the wasteland as an opportunity to rebuild the entire world. Nothing could stop them, including their own inability to see that friends could become enemies, and enemies friends.

I was born the same year this movie was made, and grew up imbued with that sense of victory that my parents generation won the hard way.