"Let's remember the energy. Americans were governing not only themselves but some two hundred million people in Italy, Austria, Germany, and Japan. The war-crimes trials were cleansing the earth of its devils once and for all. Atomic power was ours alone. Rationing was ending, price controls were being lifted; an explosion of self-assertion, auto workers, steel workers - laborers by the millions demanded more and went on strike for it. And playing Sunday morning softball on Chancellor Avenue field and pickup basketball on the asphalt courts behind the school were all the boys who had come back alive, neighbors, cousins, older brothers, their pockets full of separation pay, the GI Bill inviting them to break out in ways they could not have imagined possible before the war. Our class started high school six-months after the unconditional surrender of the Japanese, during the greatest moment of collective inebriation in American history. And the upsurge of energy was contagious. Around usus nothing was lifeless. Sacrifice and constraint were over. The Depression had disappeared Everything was in motion. The lid was off. Americans were to start over again, en masse, everyone in it together."
American Pastoral
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