“Those who do not learn history are doomed to repeat it.”
That’s what I tell my students, but these animals still won’t pay attention.
Welcome to History With Heston. I’m Joseph R. Heston, history teacher at a Philadelphia public high school. I’ve been teaching the subject for about seventeen years now. The students have been paying attention for none of them.
I hate these little bastards. Every year they get worse, they get more disrespectful, and they get dumber. I didn’t sign up to babysit a bunch of retards while they watch TikTok videos on their phones. I didn’t put myself through six years of college to play parent for seven hours a day to a bunch of overgrown hormonal shits with no respect for authority. I came to teach some fucking history.
These pampered brats wouldn’t have lasted five minutes back in the day. Imagine if these little dickheads were the ones fighting the Nazis in World War 2. I’d be writing this in German.
This generation would crap their pants if they had to storm Omaha Beach on that fateful day, June 6th, 1944. They wouldn’t be able to secure their own shit-stained drawers let alone a beachhead five miles deep into occupied France.
The Germans weren’t fucking around. They knew the Allies were coming from the sea, they just didn’t know from where. German Field Marshall Erwin Rommel thought the Allies would attack at the Pas de Calais, because it was the closest point to Britain and home to launch sites for German rockets. Rommel concentrated most of his defense at this point.
Instead, the Allies launched massive coastal assaults on five other spots, including the infamous Omaha Beach.
Can you picture any of today’s generation making that rough landing, charging headfirst into machine gun fire from the German 352nd nestled safely in their pillboxes while artillery rained death down on their heads like a merciless storm of metallic hellfire? I sure as hell can’t. This is a generation that gets hurt by posts on Instagram and TikTok. They get PTSD from being told “No” by their parents, facing the ravages of war would leave them catatonic.
Securing the beachhead at Normandy took almost a week of intense, grueling, and bloody combat. I can’t get my students to put their phones down for ten whole minutes before I see them dicking around again. An entire week of hard work clearing out mine-laden Belgian gates and steel hedgehogs to make way for the tanks? Forget it. If these technology-addicted assholes had to storm Normandy we’d be fucked because they’d be more concerned with taking selfies and complaining about the artillery hurting their ears.
The young men in the 1st Infantry fought tooth and nail to remove the Germans from their pillboxes and machine gun nests. This wasn’t some game of Fortnite or Call of Duty, this was real life with consequences you took to the grave. One wrong move and BOOM, you were lying face down in the sand with your organs spilling from your stomach. If you were lucky you were only rendered momentarily deaf by the rocket exploding next to you.
If this generation we have now was tasked with planning the invasion of Normandy the Germans would have known everything before the meeting was even over. These damn kids share everything on social media. I had one bright young man in one of my classes boast about robbing someone on his social media. Great move, genius! General Frederick Morgan’s plans would have been posted to some dickhead’s Instagram before they were even finished, and we’d have half our army crying about how they don’t want to go because they get seasick.
The bravery of the young men of the various regiments who fought and died on the shores of Normandy during Operation Overlord ultimately paved the way for the liberation of occupied France, and eventually the fall of Nazi Germany. They didn’t do it with hashtags or cellphones or social media.
They did it with guts and glory.