When it was much worse

 From Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com:

It sometimes verges on soap opera but the drama World on Fire, the  new  British TV series about World War II now being broadcast on PBS, is often very effective at getting across what it might have been like for participants and onlookers in the 1939-45 conflict, which killed perhaps 60 million people. And it reminds viewers that what people in my parents’ and generation called “The  War’’ was much worse than COVID-19. As teaching and knowledge of history continue to dangerously fade in America, we tend to present current or very recent events as far more momentous than much more important ones in the past.  You can see this in how many people rank recent U.S. presidents as “greater’’ than obviously more important ones deeper in the past. Call it recency bias.

Whatever. The 1970s  British documentary series The World at War remains, in my view, the best  and most moving series on that horrific conflict. (The war created many of us – e.g., my parents met in a  naval officers club in New York in 1943. They married late that year, and a few weeks later my father was on destroyer used to support the American landings at Anzio, Italy, where a long and epic battle took place.)

U.S. infantry landing at Anzio