http://www.lewrockwell.com/north/north432.html
Dear Professor North,
I hope when I have matured like you, I can codify “wisdom” for others to use.
Born in 47, I grew up too late for the “free love” but not too late for the effects of Vietnam Republic Of. As a young republican, on my way to being a Libertarian, I think you may want to somehow capture the real impact of Vietnam on me and my peers. I think that it fundamentally altered the USA probably as much as the American Revolution, the Civil War, the Great Depression, and WW2. I’m not a philosopher, educator, or a historian. I’m an “injineer”. http://public.2idi.com/=reinkefj I basically earn my daily bread by fixing things. Information Technology and Business Processes. But, fixing things never the less.
So I may not be qualified to opine on this fracture in the late 60’s being the watershed event to “bend” the flow of the American history. But I feel, I sense, that this single thing did more to “break the spirit” of my generation than anything else. From that “breaking” several bad things followed.
Let me cite some evidence from my personal life. I was deferred while I was in College from 64-69. I was a five year engineer – the draft had some effect on keeping me diligently in school – as well as interested in that fifth year to add some credentials. My peers who failed at school were immediately drafted and gone. Several absconded to Canada and the underground. That was traumatic. We lost some of the best and brightest to the Army and the underground. Had we been at peace, there is no doubt in my mind that they would have been productive members of society, contributing, with families, and adding to the synergy. I know that some of them who went underground died in the Drug Culture. I know that all of us were scared for life by the experience. After graduation, I was drafted. Recruiters screwed everyone so why should I be different. My first lesson in government lies. While I didn’t go to Vietnam, I was taken out of AT&T where I missed FOUR YEARS of opportunities.
So we have an entire generation of us “taken out” and metaphorically wasted.
On a social civil society viewpoint, the War – yet another undeclared expansion of government power – launched a splitting of America – racially, between patriotic and unpatriotic, between socialist and conservative, between the old and the new, between the modest and the Hollywood prono, between the workers and the takers, between the workers and the welfare-ists, between those individualists and those that live off the government.
I don’t see a biography of the white irish-german catholics ripped asunder and never to recover in your history proposal. I am not sure that the Fifities were the ideal we see on old TV shows, but I know everything since has NOT been better.
That should be in your history lesson.
Hope this ramble helps define what history should be taught,
John
Reinke Faces Life 