Are we talking about the middle of World War II in the US? A war that resulted in exactly 6 civilian deaths in the continental US and destroyed all serious competition for US industry for decades to come? That was one of the economically most advantageous positions in history.
I think it is pretty reasonable to say that even for those in the continental US the state of the world in 1942 provided much more cause for concern than anything going on right now. At the very least, for a child born then you would be very unsure what kind of world they would end up growing up in.
True--I don't think things got better in the US until after the Korean War. And even the 60s were marred by Vietnam (far more than the impact of the War on Terror).
My parents were born in Peru in 1941/42. Peru was neutral for much of the war, but in 1942 they began deporting Japanese individuals suspected of Axis sympathies to internment camps in the US. In 1945 Peru entered the war on the Allied side. If the war hadn't ended, I'm pretty sure my dad and his family would have been interned.
And even after the war, the situation was unreal. My dad's uncle didn't believe that Japan had lost the war. He thought it was all just allied propaganda. In 1949 he sold all his possessions and took his family back to Japan--to Okinawa, in fact. When he got there, he saw the truth: the country was smashed to rubble, and he had to beg in the streets for food. My grandfather travelled to Japan, taking my 10 year-old father in tow, to bring the uncle back to Peru.
That's probably one of the tamest, least tragic stories from that time. Even in the US, 400,000 never came home and 600,000 came back wounded. That's a million families affected. Germany, Japan, Russia, France, China, Korea, and even Britain, had far worse stories.
Whatever troubles we have now (and we have plenty), they are not on the same scale as those from that time.
I find this almost comically revisionist.
400,000 US soldiers/marines never came home. Another 600,000 came back wounded. That's at least a million families affected.
And by 1950, only five years after the end of the war, millions of men were sent overseas again for the Korean War.
And after that, the children of the returned WWII soldiers were sent off to Vietnam, unleashing the greatest civil unrest in the US since the Civil War.
And you think it was a great time for all because the dollar was worth a lot?