Straight, decent and steadfast.

Tom Brokaw found the World War II generation astonishingly straight, decent and steadfast.    A lot of it had to do with the way they were brought up and the culture in which they lived.

Greg Sheridan, foreign editor of the Australian, sends off his father and looks at the life of John Sheridan, an ordinary, extraordinary man of his generation.

It is an intense paradox of our situation that people of my father's generation were routinely much better educated than people today. You couldn't go through the Christian Brothers in those days without reading the great books, learning of the great music and studying the great history. Today we have a surfeit of information points and a dearth of education, a flood of trivial information and a lack of knowledge of who we are or where we come from.

My father tried twice to enlist in World War II but was knocked back on medical grounds both times. But he always did the right thing. Except on occasion of grave illness, he never missed Sunday mass in his entire life. One wife, one family, one profession, one religious faith, one house, his sons at the same school as him: a life as unfashionable in its limits and commitments as anything could be today. And yet a life within those self-imposed limits and commitments of vast, imaginative richness.
--
His son is a baby boomer. My father came from much the better generation, and was much the better man.

The best of a generation via Tim Blair.