Parody? No... Progress.

I've seen this meme pop up in multiple places recently. It is meant to be deriding or mocking of current teenagers. All it really shows, however, is a misunderstanding. But unlike many "I saw this and was outraged!" posts, in this case I CAN even, because of something the posters always miss.

It doesn't know it, but this meme represents progress.

The second image is preferable to the first in almost every conceivable way, with one exception; the first is on a beach, and the best the second can hope for is a beach house.

Seriously, just look at it. Anyone who can look at a generation of young males sent to die en mass for politics they don't entirely understand and think it superior to a generation trying to get people to stop being assholes to each other and sometimes making mistakes in that process (being the first generation ever to make a mistake, I'm sure) is clearly, provably insane. And how do we know that?

Because the second image is why the first exists.

Get past the rhetoric, the politics, the lines drawn on maps and most soldiers in World War 2 were not fighting because they wanted to. They fought because they had to. And when you hear their thoughts on the subject, a theme that recurs over and over again was that they fought so that no one would ever have to again.

It didn't work, it never does. War can end violence, but it doesn't create peace. The building blocks of the second World War were laid during the first, and the roots of most of our modern fears and aggression were established during the second.

But they didn't know that, couldn't have known that. They were just kids, trying to make the world a better place. And like every generation before or since, they made mistakes. But if you were to look at those soldiers... not necessarily as they are now, but as they were then, and told them that, so many decades later, the second image exists, and is true, if a bit mean-spirited... it would, perhaps, be a comfort.

So when people gripe and moan about the "Younger Generation" being "special snowflakes" or whatever, just smile and laugh, and remind them that they are what they are, and make their mistakes, because of the victories and mistakes of the so-called Greatest Generation. The second image is not a mockery of the first... it is the proof that maybe, just maybe, some of those soldiers we see on that beach got what they thought they were fighting for.