Memories of a nervous era
Something that Telemeister put in his LJ today sent my mind back to the sixties. I was in college and then having my babies back then and I had quite forgotten just what a nervous, edgy time it was.
The whole world was living under the threat of a nuclear war as the USA and the USSR squared off against each other. We laughed at Dr Strangelove not because it was funny but because if we didn't laugh we would be crying with fear. You can only survive under that sort of tension for so long and then you either go mad or you decide to ignore it and carry on regardless. The assassination of President Kennedy was the first horrible thing and it had such impact that most people remember where they were and what they were doing when they received the news. Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King just confirmed to us that the world was going to hell in a handbasket and the rot was starting where every other trend seemed to start, in America.
We watched the news and saw the terrible things happening at Kent state university and then the anti-vietnam marches. What we didn't see was the effect these marches had on the moral of the soldiers who were doing what their government told them to do.
All we see these days are programmes where the families and the media are praising the soldiers for their courage and yet the situation is the same. The President has committed the lives of these children to a war that should not concern them - except for one thing, money.
Perhaps the governments of the "first world countries" should take a tip from star trek and implement a non-involvement policy.... but, but. I am not political, I don't understand why people would want to kill another person so the point of it escapes me.
I'll stop now because I am waffling
The whole world was living under the threat of a nuclear war as the USA and the USSR squared off against each other. We laughed at Dr Strangelove not because it was funny but because if we didn't laugh we would be crying with fear. You can only survive under that sort of tension for so long and then you either go mad or you decide to ignore it and carry on regardless. The assassination of President Kennedy was the first horrible thing and it had such impact that most people remember where they were and what they were doing when they received the news. Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King just confirmed to us that the world was going to hell in a handbasket and the rot was starting where every other trend seemed to start, in America.
We watched the news and saw the terrible things happening at Kent state university and then the anti-vietnam marches. What we didn't see was the effect these marches had on the moral of the soldiers who were doing what their government told them to do.
All we see these days are programmes where the families and the media are praising the soldiers for their courage and yet the situation is the same. The President has committed the lives of these children to a war that should not concern them - except for one thing, money.
Perhaps the governments of the "first world countries" should take a tip from star trek and implement a non-involvement policy.... but, but. I am not political, I don't understand why people would want to kill another person so the point of it escapes me.
I'll stop now because I am waffling