WHAT'S THERE TO REMEMBER ON MEMORIAL DAY?

Every Memorial Day is supposed to help the living remember the dead.

But after all, we're only human, and so we usually see things darkly as through a glass. I got that from St Paul 2000 years ago, but the "darkly" still fits every new headline we tend to see as an historical epoch. Say like we did with vaudeville, Saturday movie matinees, the Big Band era, the McCarthy Hearings, film noir, and now the Great Recession. All important moments in time, but in the long term really only moments.

To earn the name epoch, it has to be something so big and so enduring that people are still reading and living it centuries later.The rise of Rome, the entrance of Christianity, the invention of the printing press, the Age of Discovery. Each of these remarkable periods took and impacted entire generations.

Then there's WWII. You know, the one kids in school still get mixed up with the Civil War, or think it had something to do with the Panama Canal, or wasn't-that-when-Teddy Roosevelt-charged-up-a-hill?

WWII took only six years (1939-45), but it also took 60 million lives...displaced another 100 million ...crashed several colonial empires...birthed a Cold War that shoved the world to the brink of atomic annihilation. But because all this played out in an age of instant global communication, what once took generations to soak into the fibers of everyday life, this soaked into billions of lives almost as it unfolded.

Which is why kids today may not know the facts and stats to WWII on this Memorial Day, but whether they know them or not, they're living them. Virtually every idea in their head and passion in their gut comes from that epochal worldwide trauma that ripped whole civilizations off their tracks.

Ironically, the technology by which today's generation live -- from penicillin to radar, from computers to cellphones, from jets to robotics -- first came into our world to wage war not peace. The moral values today's generation espouse -- their rights, their freedoms, their individuality -- aren't from the lyrics of Rock or Rap, but echo from the lives of kids who died at Normandy and Iwo Jima. The heroes today's generation see on the big screens -- Clint Eastwood, Tom Cruise, Tom Hanks, Eminem -- are celluloid copies of forgotten figures who played on the much bigger screen called life -- Chuck O'Hare, Audie Murphy, Ernie Pyle, Bill Mauldin, Glenn Miller.

This is not to condemn the students who sleep through their history classes, the winners who scoop up the riches of Wall Street, or even the well-heeled aficionados who strut their stuff in sports bars. One generation has no right to keep reminding another generation. But on each Memorial Day, it may have an obligation.