You may disagree with my point of view but please answer are you physically and mentally tougher than your father or your grandfather?
I don’t think that I am anywhere near as tough as my dad & grandfathers were. And from the old family journals the old cowboys in my family were tougher still.
My son appears to be softer than me and his son softer than him. Plenty of tough young men & women around today but in my biased view they are the exception rather than the rule.
Every generation of Americans has said this and it's largely the product of collective memory, not objective historical observations. Did previous generations have different skill sets that are less common today? Absolutely. Were they psychologically or physiologically less predisposed to "weaknesses" than we are? No. Just look at how many Civil War soldiers committed suicide, drank themselves to death, or ended up in asylums. PTSD might not have been part of the lexicon but it was there. You could make similar points about WW1, WW2, and Vietnam. None of which is to say anything negative about anyone, only that we remember the past based on how we perceive the present.
Sorry for the long post that no one wants to read, but hand a historian a semi-captive audience and...
