1945 Janus Manhattan gives boomer children a morally muddled legacy

The mixed birthright of The Children of Janus Manhattan '45  : nuclear death/penicillin life

All of us alive are in some sense Children of Janus Manhattan : all seeing our lives potentially shortened or extended by 1945 Manhattan's twin legacies of deadly atomic bombs and freely available life saving penicillin.

But those who felt that Janus tug and pull most intensely I believe were my generation (cohort more accurately) : those of us born between 1940 and 1956.

This is because we few felt the waning of Modernity and the dawning of Postmodernity in our very bones as it all happened during our crucial formative years when our personalities were as plastic as our rapidly growing bodies.

We are starting to die off now and it is time to put into the historical record exactly what it felt like to be the healthiest most scared generation of children ever ....