Stop with the WW2 comparisons

[BecomeStronger]

If I see it one more time...

Yes, living through WW2 must have been terrible. Having waved a loved one off to a real (but much smaller) war I can't begin to imagine what it was like for mothers/wives waiting back home or what living in the Blitz was like. It must certainly be incomparable to anything we're going through now.

However, everything you've ever seen or read about that time references the camaraderie of the soldiers and the community spirit back home as being what got people through. It's exactly that which is being denied currently.

Of course the physical hardships aren't comparable but mentally, to face this (or that) alone without social contact is an entirely different proposition.

I never understand why people go on so much about our generations (gen X, millennials, gen z) Being unresiliant, and that all previous generations were made of stronger stuff

They weren’t. They may have kept their misery inside, but there were still lots of people very miserable: many men took it out on the wife and kids (my dad said when he was young it was seen as ok for men to give their wife a slap to keep her in line), many came back from wars with ptsd, women died of “exhaustion”, there weren’t as many fat people as there wasn’t as much cheap, easily obtainable calorific food. But for some reason the past generations are put on a pedestal.

They were just every bit as human as us

I would imagine they do baahhh living thorough both of those must make some people determined and more resilient, whilst damaging to others.

My grandparents set up a business that is still running and generated a lot of wealth for them after WW2 so the social change it pushed through had had lasting affects.

I do think it's dismissive though when people basically say pull yourself together and stop whining because we have an idolised view of how people managed during the war.

@trappedsincesundaymorn

Imagine how much worse this would be without the advances of science that we have today, social media, mobile phones, zoom, all the technology that facilitates so much day to day life. Even step back 30 years and by golly this would be so much harder.

I actually think that without all the technology, this wouldn't be happening in the same way. It's different for a government to say that children have to do online learning for a term than to come out and say that children won't be having any education for a term (even though this was basically the case for plenty of kids). Just for example.

Tbh I find the comparison useful particularly with history loving DC... The idea that bad things happen but normality returns is mentally useful. That this one day will be a point in history. We could compare it to many other historical moments but Ww2 is recent enough to think of...

Comparison.....there is no comparison! I'd live through this any day than live through a world war!

Totally agree OP, the situation is incomparable. I don’t understand why it’s always WW2 they compare it to, they seem to get some perverse joy in talking about it. Yet the generations in my family who lived through the war don’t want to talk about it. Why not compare it to current wars?
Also the added irritation of “Britain won WW2” yes if you ignore the Soviet Union and USA.

[quote Hyperbolistic]@mynameisnotmichaelcaine it is awful and unfair. My 16 year old ds is in the same boat, but you can hardly compare it to the war when the young men 16+ (many younger) would probably have been off fighting for the country.[/quote]
But why compare it? Who does it help?

But why compare it? Who does it help?

Exactly. If someone started a thread about their husband's newly discovered affair, and I replied that my grandmother coped with losing her husband in the war and this generation was too soft, everyone would rightly think it was a nasty and irrelevant response. And yet somehow when people post about problems caused by the pandemic, suddenly lots of people think it's perfectly appropriate. Why?

The "why?" is a genuine question by the way. I really would like to understand why people see it as different, because I don't get it.

Another one tired of the war comparisons.

But they are there in the language we use about covid. ‘Lockdown’, normally used when there’s an active shooter. ‘Shelter In Place’ - popular where I am, also used when there’s an attack of some kind. Also ‘Frontline Worker’. Maybe ‘public-facing worker’ would be less charged. For many people, ‘being on the frontline’ suggests conflict and fighting.

Both times have had downsides but this really is in no way comparable with living through multi-year wars. My granny once told me that if Hitler had won, her father had a plan where he would have shot her her siblings to spare them from whatever might come next. I just can’t imagine living with that level of fear for years. She was very matter of fact about it. She also spoke about having babies through the rationing period and just how little there was to feed the family.

I dont understand the comparisons either. What my father, his brothers and contemporaries went through ( and by default their relations waiting at home in bomb filled London) as soldiers fighting far from home was so awful that we should be ashamed to think our present situation is even remotely comparable.