Yesterday, June 6th, was D-Day. I would bet if you were to ask most people under 25 today what D-Day meant, you’d get a blank stare, or perhaps some mention of a dance club DJ.
I was born 10 years and 3 months after the official end of World War II. By the time I got into school and we were learning our history around the event, it was far enough in our past that I thought of it as ancient history. I’m sure that today’s students, some 65 years after the end of the war put it in the same category as the War of 1812 or the War of the Roses. Something that happened a very long time ago and has nothing to do with them. Words in a book.
Sure, the news today is constantly full of the “Iraq War” or the “Afghanistan War”, and most of our younger generation has some concept of warfare, at least on the abstract. Because there is no longer a draft, where every young man was required to serve in the armed forces, and because none of the wars or skirmishes that we have been involved in since 1960 have actually involved U.S. territory, the awfulness of war and the hardships required are simply abstract situations we observe on television.
It is hard to grasp that a mere 65-70 years ago, nearly every nation on the planet was directly involved in war. Nearly every single country took sides, and all the great powers of the world were involved. We have lasting evidence of the alliances formed in todays NATO and the United Nations Security Council.
Many young people today are completely unaware that immediately after World 
War II, the United States was the only authorized government in Japan and the allied forces ruled Germany. The United States occupied Japan from August of 1945 until April of 1952. Germany was more complex, with four zones of occupation, American; British; French and Soviet. German was eventually split into two countries, with the occupation of the Western portion continuing until 1955. The German Democratic Republic, or East Germany was founded in 1949 and was largely run by the Soviet government until late 1955.
Germany recombined into a single country in 1990.
Even though we see news stories about “the war” daily, it has very little impact on our daily lives. Nothing like World War II, where nearly everything was rationed. I wonder how todays young people would react if told they could no longer fill up their car with gas whenever they wanted, or that they could no longer purchase sugar, meat or butter at the grocery store whenever they needed? I have a hard time seeing the population of todays United States being so cooperative were the government to suddenly ration such things.
During World War II, such things as gasoline, cars, bicycles, shoes, coffee, meats and canned fish, cheese — all these items were rationed. Thousands of rationing boards were established around the country, and they decided what sort of stamps a family or individual might get, based on family size, importance of any job performed, and of course, what was available to be disbursed.
Times have changed of course. I’m sure that should a new global confrontation arise, and rationing were necessary, we would see a whole new list of items. For one thing, there really isn’t much actually manufactured in the United States anymore. There are lots of things that are “assembled” here – mostly cars, but the parts are produced in Vietnam, China, Thailand, Mexico – any place where labor is less expensive. With the economies of most major world powers being global today, we would see a vastly different impact.
I’m not sure that were we required to sacrifice as our parents (or grandparents) 
did for World War II that we could do something similar today. So many of our youth are so accustomed to their McDonald’s chicken strips and daily dose of video games that I wonder what sort of state of bewilderment would they be in should that be ripped from them?
I suppose that I’m just being silly, and that if we had to do something similar today, we would come together and do whatever we needed. We see glimpses of this when a natural disaster hits a region – like a tornado or a hurricane flattening a town or a county – for a short time, people come together and it all works out fine.