D-Day 65 Years On

This weekend, amidst continuing debates over the effectiveness of President Obama’s speech to the Muslim world and the myriad problems facing the country at this time, marks the 65th anniversary of D-Day. As in previous years, the date will be marked by ceremonies around the world, with the dwindling population of WWII veterans in attendance at some of these events, aged specters signifying a time when wars, if bloodier but as tragic as any today, seemed to have defined purposes and goals, contemptible though they may have been. I have never been one to mark such anniversaries, but I will be taking a journey into the heart of America and Americana, as I attend, with my grandfather (a WWII veteran, though not of the Normandy landings), a D-Day commemoration at the Eisenhower Presidential Library in Abilene, Kansas.

It will be a strange experience for me, I being a mid-20s writer likely surrounded by an cadre of elderly folks who vividly remember the day in question, but have little knowledge of, say, what a blog is. It may seem to be an inappropriate comparison to draw, but consider that for people like my grandfather, who has never used a computer, the late 00s are an increasingly alienating age; it’s a time defined by technology that promises interconnectedness but often has no room for someone like him, a would-be technological immigrant, unable to speak the language, who has decided that, in the unknown number of years remaining for him, the barrier of entry is not worth the trouble. And so we will spend the weekend steeped in the past, surely a worthy endeavor but also wistfully sad. Because how many years are left for commemorations like this? How much longer until all who bore witness are gone or incapable of remembering? Will my second-hand knowledge be worth anything? And does that knowledge add to the preciousness of these dwindling years, or does it produce a feeling of something slipping beyond our grasp?

At one job I held not long after graduating from college, several of my co-workers asked each other when World War II was. They had no idea and that lack of knowledge didn’t matter to them. They may have thought it was simple ephemera, fodder for Jeopardy or a session of bar trivia, but really nothing reflective of knowledge or intelligence—much less a connection with the world’s formative, painful history that, to this day, affects broad swaths of geopolitics. The man who asked the question didn’t turn to his computer to Google “WWII” and find out the answer. Instead he asked aloud, as if there were no harm in not knowing, but only because—I could tell from his voice—there was little point in knowing, no profit in it. I prefer not to advocate shame as a motivator, but if only he thought there had been something to gain, that to learn something from those who were there is fleeting and irreplaceable. We won’t have such opportunities soon, and no number of YouTube clips can be more than glossy simulacra.