The thing is we look at history as if it were a movie being played out in videos or books but not really emotionally involving most of the boomers and their progeny all that much. Unless one engages in serious active duty in Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, or in the smaller skirmishes such as Bosnia or Somalia, the horrors of war seem pretty far removed from our current reality. The World War II and Korea crowd are getting really up there in years now. Not all that many Holocaust survivors left. I read I think this morning that the last World War I veteran died this week at the age of 110.
All this is to say that most of us have no memory of the real horrors necessary to achieve democracy and most of those left who have seen combat have not witnessed democracy developing out of it as there have been no wars 'won' since World War II.
Coming from a military family, however, my head is full of the war stories--the victories, triumphs, successes, failures, and everything in between. And also the horrors.
We Americans pretty much shut out the horrors that are occurring even now in some of the Islamic nations, in some African countries brutalized by terrorist warlords, etc. We don't think about all that much. Nothing we can do about it so out of sight, out of mind.
And America has devolved into this sort of let the government protect and take care of us if we get into serious trouble and I wonder if we have lost much of the spirit and determination to take care of ourselves? I don't know how well we would cope with a World War II these days.
I hope my concerns are ill founded.
The government is made up of people (not supermen), instead elitist bureaucrats, corporatist lobbyists and economists. The America (and the west) you are talking of died by the end of the Korean War, and was consumed by people that wanted war not to ease suffering or create a better world, or free people, but instead to support a war for resources and control. Iraq was such a mess because it was divided among those who really did want to free and better Iraq and those that simply wanted to take its resources and exploit its population.
America is ideologically divided in government between those who view Americas role in the world is to exploit, and control to retain US supremacy, those who feel the US should leave the world to collapse in on itself, or those who want to fight bit by bit and use diplomatic tools until there is no dictatorship left standing (it was thanks to Bush after all that Pakistan became a democracy), all those factions show themselves once in a while in US actions/inactions across the world.
Hardly. I BARELY passed Introduction to Physics and don't remember a whole lot of that,
