"Are we never going to learn that the flotsam of our invincible ignorance will always come back to haunt us on a rising tide?"A quote from Paul VanDevelder's book Savages and Scoundrels: The Untold Story of America's Road to Empire Through Indian Territory, which won the 2011 Oregon Book Award.
How many ignorant things of the nation variety can you think of that have been done in your lifetime? I can think of several, but the first that comes to mind is getting militarily involved in the Middle East. Those wars will haunt us . . . and our children's children.
What's yours?
3 comments:
lord, the list! i was a young child during the mccarthy hearings, but i do remember them, and teach them in a section of my 'tv in american life ' course. letting him get as far as he got is a good starter. allowing states to keep segregated buses/schools/lunch counters as long as they did. getting into and staying in vietnam, and then, cambodia. electing nixon president after he'd been a jerk as vice president years earlier....
that's just off the top of my head.....
Not bad . . . for off the top of the head. :-)
I would agree about McCarthyism; it put us on the road to "out Stalin" Joseph Stalin himself.
We have never turned back. The hearing were our "show trials", things like Grenada were out Hungaries and Czechoslovakias, and stuff like Afghanistan is our Afghanistan.
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