As a member of the so-called Silent Generation – not that friends or family would ever call me silent – I’ve occasionally been called “set in my ways” (i.e., old and stubborn), but there’s a reason for that. After you’ve been around a while, you tend to get irascible when you watch the younger generations make the same mistakes their parents and grandparents did. Especially when those mistakes cost billions of dollars and get thousands or tens of thousands of people get killed.
We had a Civil War, once upon a time, and over 600,000 young men were killed, because it was not only a civil war, but a culture war. One culture thought people were not born equal and that those born white were superior; the other culture believed that people were created equal. The “equal creation” culture won the shooting war, but they’re still fighting the guerilla tactics of the white nationalists over a hundred-fifty years later. And this is in a theoretically democratic culture.
Then there were the two world wars, in the first of which a bloc of countries that believed in authoritarian rule took on a group of nations that, in general, did not. The second world war followed the same general pattern, as did the Korean War.
All that, while real to me, is ancient history to virtually all Americans.
More recent history, if still ancient to the younger generations, includes the Vietnam War, in which we sided, in fact, with an abusive colonial-derived authoritarian regime against a popular and also abusive but local communist uprising.
Then came the Middle East mélange, a series of conflicts where the United States attempted so-called nation building as an alternative to abusive sectarian/authoritarian regimes in Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, and now, once more, Iran.
And somehow, everyone is surprised, again, that the truly abused peoples in these lands really don’t want to “fight to the death” against their home-grown abusers. They’ll accept them, if reluctantly, in a way that they won’t accept foreign (to them) western democratic systems. And, in a way, they’re right to reject our style of governing for their cultures.
After all, we’re still fighting guerilla actions here at home resulting from a conflict that theoretically ended over a hundred and fifty years ago.
