Your grandparents came of age in the Great Depression, when everyday life was about deprivation and sacrifice, when the economic conditions of the time were so grave and so unrelenting it would have been easy enough for the American dream to fade away.
Interpretation
This quote highlights the resilience of those who lived through the Great Depression and their determination to pursue the American Dream despite hardships.
Tom Brokaw reflects on the struggles faced by the previous generation during the Great Depression. He emphasizes how this challenging era could have obliterated the American Dream, yet many persevered through deprivation and sacrifice, showcasing immense resilience and fortitude. It serves as a reminder of the strength of the human spirit in the face of adversity.
In practice
During a speech about overcoming obstacles, one could reference this quote to illustrate the historical context of resilience.
The WWII generation shares so many common values: duty, honor, country, personal responsibility and the marriage vow " For better or for worse--it was the last generation in which, broadly speaking, marriage was a commitment and divorce was not an option
While Pickstown may not be what it once was, it still is framed by the natural beauty of the ancient river, the sweep of the Great Plains, and the long, unbroken shoreline of the lake behind the dam. It gave me a 19th-century childhood in a modern mid-20th-century town, and for that I will always be grateful.
I am simply the most conspicuous part of a large, thoroughly dedicated and professional staff that extends from just behind these cameras, across this country and around the world, in too many instances, in places of grave danger and personal hardship. They're family to me.
I had good care going. I had Meredith and the family. And I didn't want to become the object of some kind of pity, most of all. I didn't want to show up on the Internet, 'Tom Brokaw has cancer.'
Heroes are people who rise to the occasion and slip quietly away.
It is, I believe, the greatest generation any society has ever produced.
If we trace the history of any nation backwards into the past, we come at last to a period of myths and traditions which eventually fade away into impenetrable darkness.
Well into the 20th century, black people spoke of their flight from Mississippi in much the same manner as their runagate ancestors had.
If you were lost for America, there is nobody who could keep the army and the revolution [going] for six months.
History is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation.
The great bulk of the legal voters of the South were men who owned no slaves; their homes were generally in the hills and poor country; their facilities for educating their children, even up to the point of reading and writing, were very limited; their interest in the contest was very meagre--what there was, if they had been capable of seeing it, was with the North; they too needed emancipation.
For nearly a century and a half, this country deluded itself into thinking that its greatest calamity, the Civil War, had nothing to do with one of its greatest sins, enslavement. It deluded itself in this manner despite available evidence to the contrary.
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