The Americans who fought bitterly against each other over Vietnam have grown up, and now they carry out those forty year old fights today regarding Iraq. Hippies and straight-lacers, but now both with suits on and in Congress and the White House.
I am young, and it angers me to think that my parents' generation is still fighting the same fights they had in the sixties. How do we change this? Or are we resigned to suffering it until that generation goes to its grave?
It continues...
I just watched the PBS video
The Sixties: The Years That Shaped a Generation, and I've been staying up thinking about the rift that Vietnam caused in America, and how that generation's rift is still being played out today in our current political climate, especially as regards Iraq. The kids who supported and staffed campaigns for Eugene McCarthy, Bobby Kennedy, Richard Nixon, and George Wallace are all grown up now and in Washington, still having the same fights they were having then. Bill Clinton got savaged because he represented a "hippy" in power. John Kerry continues to be called a "traitor" to this day. Hawks in the current administration think that this time they're going to win the war, by god, and they won't let another Walter Conkrite lose it for them.
And so much of the vicious argument on all sides deals with counterfactuals ("if only this had happened, then things would have been okay")--which means everyone is constantly looking at only the selections from history that they want to acknowledge.
I went out and visited a number of blogs--pundits, mid-east experts, activists, soldiers. It's as though we are fated to carry out the same poisoning argument over and over again, fueled by our narrow frames of experience and tendency to read only likeminded sources. Kossacks reading other Kossacks, military bloggers reading other military bloggers, right-wingers reading other right-wingers.
How do we break this cycle? We have got to reach out beyond our viewpoints on occasion, try to expose ourselves to something that challenges what we believe. At the best, it will bring us more onto the same page with each other as to just what the facts are; at the least, it will give us the ability to more effectively argue against whatever we already oppose.
So a thought: after everytime you visit DailyKos, try reading a blog of a viewpoint that you tend to disagree with or be unfamiliar with. Read an ultra-patriot soldier's blog. Get down with what the right-blogosphere is talking about. Find an expert that provides information you're not getting elsewhere. Heck, even read a book once a year by someone you think you'd disagree with. Reach across viewpoints, even if you dont grasp them fully. And talk to people who come from totally different places. Please.
It's the only way we can try not to get stuck in our narrow frames and keep having the same mutual hostility and distrust that's been around for the last forty years.
(Just needed to get that out of me, feeling despondent. My thoughts are jumbled; I just have this unshakeable sense that we should either institute the draft and send 200,000 people there right now, or just pull out 100% immediately--that there's just no middle ground anymore. Put up or go home, y'know?)
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My dose of other realities today...Top 100 Military Blog Index
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