On the Normandy beaches, a foundation was laid -- at a terrible price.
EARLY ON IN the Normandy invasion, time was denominated day by agonizing day as the Americans and British and their allies pushed into France, fighting every step of the way: D-Day plus one, D-Day plus two . . . . advancing inch by inch, it seemed. Now it's counted in years -- 65 of them as of today, a full working lifetime for anyone born around June 6, 1944.
For the great majority of these Americans, as they near Social Security age, life has been pretty good in a lot of ways. Their parents, who served and survived, came home to the GI Bill and (with the inevitable downturns now and then) a surging economy. America started making cars again, and refrigerators, and then here came television. Incomes rose, homes were built by the millions and, for those who weren't faring so well, government was playing an ever-larger role as backstop, though never on the scale of war-devastated countries overseas.
In time the federal government became, too, an enforcer of equality, bringing a greater measure of justice and equality to longtime victims of racial discrimination, as well as more benefits of the postwar boom and the modern American economy.
The country incurred an enormous financial debt in World War II, the sort of thing that would supposedly be visited on generations to come. But in this case, Americans got out from under it rather quickly while wisely taking on more debt with the Marshall Plan to aid Europe.
One great debt remains, however, and it is harder -- perhaps impossible -- to repay. It is owed to the hundreds of thousands of Americans (and their allies) for whom D-Day, or some day like it in Europe or North Africa or the Pacific, was the last day of their lives -- lives that usually ended with so few years on them: 17, 19, 22, 30. Every year when The Post fails to mark D-Day on this page, we hear complaints from a few of our readers. Too few, really -- people who still know how terrible was the loss for many Americans and how much it meant for all of us who live. The debt is still owed, payable only in the dwindling currency of remembrance.
