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.
For historians ought to be precise, truthful, and quite unprejudiced, and neither interest nor fear, hatred nor affection, should cause them to swerve from the path of truth, whose mother is history, the rival of time, the depository of great actions, the witness of what is past, the example and instruction of the present, the monitor of the future.
I never thought I'd see the day that I would see white folks as frightened, or more so, than black folks was during the civil rights movement when we was in Mississippi.
In the new Georgia, Stalin is no longer Georgian. He's a Russian emperor.
One constant among the elements of 1914—as of any era—was the disposition of everyone on all sides not to prepare for the harder alternative, not to act upon what they suspected to be true.
This wicked man Hitler, the repository and embodiment of many forms of soul-destroying hatred. this monstrous product of former wrongs and shame.
We know from our recent history that English did not come to replace U.S. Indian languages merely because English sounded musical to Indians' ears. Instead, the replacement entailed English-speaking immigrants' killing most Indians by war, murder, and introduced diseases, and the surviving Indians' being pressured into adopting English, the new majority language.
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