America and Fear - Part 2

Change breeds fear; that is only natural. In the last blog, I touched on some of the silly ways technology changed, silly, but useful and important, and silly but, in odd ways, disturbing and disorenting. Now, let's get a bit more serious.                               

 Only 150 years ago, a blip in the history of humanity, we fought the Civil War. Wars, in the European tradition were almost gentlemanly affairs. The Civil War changed that. With modern equipment, battles were turned into slaughters and men were killed and crippled at a horrific rate. Anilhilation seemed the goal, as evidenced by Sherman's March to the Sea, a dispicable act in which he burned everything in site as he passed through the South.  

Afterword, Americans, understandibly lost their taste for war. The Spanish war barely counts and left many Americans embarrassed at our obvious imperialism. We did not want WW1 and were promised by President Wilson that we would stay out. However, the Powers that Be had other notions and we were manipulated into fighting, and it was far worse than the Civil War, unthinkably nightmarish. Keep in mind that this was but 100 years ago.  

Then we were subjected to a ridiculous bit of social engineering, Prohibition. No alcohol was allowed and while that didn't slow down people's drinking, it gave rise to organized crime. Until then, the Mafia was mostly into loan sharking and extortion. Prohibiton gave them a new way to make money and they made a lot. It also gave them a structure that later became the basis for the Nation's drug trafficking.       

Booze was relegalized just in time for the Great Depression. Now we are within 80 years of the present. Some who went through that are still alive. Look at the old photos from that time. Once proud, hard working men were reduced to begging and haunting soup kitchens. There was little work and if you had a job, you worked dirt cheap. Some good came out of the mess. Labor laws were tightened and Unions gained strength, so when the economy finally rebounded, the common man had actually made some gains.              

Then after again being promised by President Roosevelt that we would not fight in Eurpoe, the Powers that Be again showed that they were pulling the strings and we ended up in WW2 an affair that made WW1 look like a stroll through the park on a sunny spring afternoon. We won, but at great cost. Still, Americans showed great resolve and the newly thriving middle class went home and got busy.                                                          

That was all great, but there was one thing. Well, actually a few, but they were all linked. At the end of the war, Truman ordered the dropping of the atomic bomb, sort of a punctuation mark telling the world that, ready or nor, the war was over. But, our much mis-trusted ally, the Soviet Union was said to have developed their own bomb and was building an arsenal at an alarming rate and that, since they were dispicably evil Comminusits, that we had to be ready to fight their looming threat. We got all of this from spies. However, in a fit of lunacy, our brand new CIA had hired the old  Nazi spy ring, who were thought to have agents deep in Russia, to conductr intellighence operations. Nothing much was really going on, and the ex-Nazis knew that the only way they were going to avoid being hanged for war crimes was by producing results, so they did the logical thing, they lied. (this by the way, is not conjecture, it has been acknowledged by our government and by the ex-Nazis). They told tales of great atomic arsenals and emminent invasions and, so we were launched into the Cold War. We also had a hot war in Korea and to this day, I have never heard a rational explanation for that war. Yeah, we were opposing Communism, but we offered no alternative. We were backing an aging, cruel, corrupt, war lord who the Koreans hated, But, fight we did, until the whole mess just sort of ran out of steam and both sides went back to the way things were before we needlessly killed a bunch of their folks and got a bunch of our own kids killed.                                                                                                             

Now, we are only 60 years removed from the present and the threat of possible nuclear anihilation was held over our heads. It worked, in that we allowed the Government to spend unthinkable amounts on military build up. However, it scared the crap out of everyone. Useless and expensive backyard bomb shelters were built and kids in grade school  were taught that if we saw a sudden flash, we should duck and cover. We had drills wher we practiced ducking uder our desks and covering our eyes. We used to add a third step. Duck, cover, and kiss your ass goodbye. Funny in retrospect, but such a morbid sense of humor is not becoming in kids.     

Then in rapid order, we had the Cuban Missle Crisis, in which we almost did use those nukes, the Kennedy Assassination, the Civil Rights upheaval, the RFK Assassination, the MLK Assassination, and the debacle that was Viet Nam ( just like Korea, I have never heard a rational argument for why we had that war) and all of the accompanying student unrest, which culminated in the sight of National Guard troops shooting unarmed protestors at Kent State. No  wonder LSD seemed like a good idea, it was about the only way to get as crazy as those running the country seemed to be. Again, we are now only 50 yeras from the present.     

Many of us, by this time, didn't have much of a clue what was happening, but we, battered and bruised, hung in and staggered into the 70s, 80s and 90s, times when it seemed like some technology loving fairy had waved a magic wand over us, and we found ourselves cranking out new gadjets at a phenomenal rate. Just when you got used to something, it became obsolete. Now, that is certainly better than facing instant destruction on a minute by minute basis. Still, constant change is disorienting and folks simply couldn't find a bit of solid ground to stand on. In the next blog, I will look at those decades in more depth