No Wusses in 1940

Reflecting on The Wussification of the Workplace, reader Kris H. sends this along with the remark, “somehow, we all seemed tougher, back then.”

Perhaps it’s because we’d immigrated, invented, got through “the war to end all wars” and a great depression, in the preceding decades. People in 1940 had gone through an awful lot to get there.

Perhaps it is the relative (and much vaunted) “peace and prosperity” of our recent past that has weakened us unto wussyhood. We have had the luxury of nursing hurt feelings and naval-gazing, and that has not played to our strengths.

But there is still hope, you know. Perhaps we’ll soon have a depression of our own to get through . . . or worse.