TODAY – AT 10:16 A.M. ET:   Today is D-Day.  To those of us of a certain age, the day still has deep meaning. 

It was on this day in 1944 that Allied forces invaded northern France, breaching Hitler's wall, and entering the heartland of Europe.   World War II in Europe would be over in less than a year. 

We seemed to understand D-Day, and its importance, for many decades after the war.  After all, the Supreme Allied Commander in Europe, Dwight D. Eisenhower, became president of the United States in 1953, leaving office in 1961.  And Ronald Reagan gave the most moving of all D-Day speeches in 1984, some 40 years after the invasion.  His successor, George H.W. Bush, who left office in 1993, was the last American president to serve in the Second World War.

In the years since, our memory of the war, and its meaning, have faded.  A new, poorly educated generation, a product of the fever swamps of American colleges, seems little interested in the sacrifices of its ancestors.  We have become soft and spoiled.  CNN anchorwomen regularly announce that we are today a "war weary" nation.  Really?  What has made us war weary?  Being inconvenienced at an airport?

Six months after D-Day we fought the Battle of the Bulge, where 20,000 Americans were killed by Nazi forces in six weeks, out of an America of 139 million.  That's war weariness.  What we have today, outside our armed forces, is bother.

We have always had a core citizenry that will keep the flame, those whom FDR called the "unending line" of patriots.  They are the ones who today, and into the future, will remember D-Day.

I like to think that most of the readers of Urgent Agenda are part of that line. 

Ronald Reagan's speech on D-Day, 1984.

June 6,  2016