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When exactly did America lose its innocence?
Glyph
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
I keep hearing people saying it lost its innocence on 9/11, but didn't they say the same thing during Vietnam? And after the bombing of Pearl Harbor? And during the Philippine-America war? And during the Civil War? And during the expansion into Amerindian territories?
How many times is America going to lose its innocence?
And what does that even mean anyway?
How many times is America going to lose its innocence?
And what does that even mean anyway?
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I'm very curious about this statement for 2 reasons. One is the premise. Sure, we do experience trauma much less than many developing nations where conflict and toppling of governments are par for the course. But advanced, developed nations with high standards of living? I dont know to what degree that is true.
Second. If we give you that we experience trauma less, we dont exactly forget. We still take off our shoes at the airport because of one dude. The semi-permanent over-reaction to trauma indicates that we do not forget. Maybe if we experienced trauma more often, we would get used to it and not go apeshit every time something crazy happened. Either that or we would go crazy from the stress.
So do I, and it annoys me every time.
The only thing America lost on 9/11 was its shit. Also the plot.
EDIT: Although, to be fair, 9/11 is unique in one fashion. It is one of the few tragedies in world history that had millions of eyewitnesses. Every other disaster happened where only a select few ever saw it, but not 9/11. The world saw that one as it happened.
Still doesn't justify all the shit that's gone down in the decade since.
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Not a bad record, sure... but it's so much a loss of innocence as it was a kick to the pants telling us to wake up and realize our actions affect the rest of the world and there may be consequences we don't like.
I made no statement in relation to advanced, developed nations.
The rituals we've adopted - especially the useless ones like most airport stuff -are part of how we adapt. These eventually just become part of our daily life, like locking our doors.
Looking at things objectively, I'd sure as hell prefer to deal with Al Qaeda than Soviet Russia. I'll even take another 9/11 before I take another Cuban Missile Crisis. I'll definitely take the war on terror vs. Mutually Assured Destruction. Not to diminish the lives lost in 9/11 or any other terrorist attacks, but at least they're isolated events. Nuclear brinksmanship has the potential to simply wipe out humanity. Just because nobody ended up firing the nukes doesn't mean we weren't in danger.
Besides that: If you're a minority, if you're a woman, if you're not hetero: Now's an awfully good time to be alive.
Well, think about France. World War 1, they had something like 1.7 million dead and 4.3 million injured... In a country of 40 million people. That's basically an entire generation wiped out. If you figure 20 million men, it's 1 in 4 Frenchmen getting shot. WW2 had more than a half million more deaths, both military and civilians. Not to mention all the massive damage to infrastructure and hardly an economy to speak of. That's an awfully rough 40 years. And yeah Vietnam tore America apart, but that's nothing compared to what America did to Vietnam.
Alternatively, I take it to be a commentary on the idea that the US has lost the moral highground after some of the actions since.
Well said. The "things were more innocent back in the day" tripe makes me angry for reasons I've already explained before. What is a more innocent time? The 60's when segregation still existed and a Protestants and Catholics each thought the other could not enter heaven? The forties when WW2 was going on? Lets go the whole nine yards. The pilgrims were much more innocent---oh, witch burnings, right.
You have to do a lot of whitewashing of history to call the past "more innocent."
also, every generation has a new group of people who weren't alive for the last trauma and thus don't feel the pain or understand the significance of it.
Well, be honest. We decided that it was worth fighting to not have to pay more in taxes to an off-shore power than a favored corporation does.
The founding fathers were more sour grapes anti-corporate than anti-imperialist monarchy.
Which I figure puts their innocence at about zero to lose.
Plus there's those whole slavery and native american genocide things.
Don't let facts get in the way of a good story.
Exactly. The other phrase I hear batted about a lot is "9/11 changed everything." For whom? After ten years of warfare, a bit more than one million American service members have been deployed to Iraq, and that sounds like a big, round number until you remember that there are 307 million of us living here. As a matter of policy, "changed everything" has been limited to the lives of around half of a percentage point of our population; for the overwhelming majority of our country, change means taking off your shoes when you wait in line at an airport terminal.
And that's okay. My hope is that as time goes by and especially with Osama Bin Laden dead and at the bottom of the sea, we'll realize that one horrible day didn't actually fundamentally alter our lives the way we thought it had, and we'll stop ruining things for the other 0.5% and the rest of the world in general.
That was Family Guy.
And that is also how I feel about people who whitewash the past.
God I love that commercial so much. I almost bought a Challenger because of it.
It was the Futurama episode where Fry becomes extremely rich.
America was never innocent and has been committing the occasional atrocities like every other country.
Family Guy's was a different joke.
Pretty sure we still are as a nation. Sure we understand a little bit better as a whole, but the average American (including myself) is still pretty flippin' ignorant of the outside world and just delude themselves (not including me) that America is the last bastion of awesomeness and purity and the rest of the world are just barbarians.
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The US never had the moral high ground, are you kidding me? It wasn't a horrible cesspool, but you guys have a decades-long history of your intelligence services acting to overthrow democratically elected governments who just happened to be a bit socialist or opposed to your industries. Not to mention the whole civil rights thing. The US was never special, it just happened to be rich.
Well, we're special in that we were the first nation to legally set out why we should be a nation, but other than that you're right.
Like I said, 1604 at the latest.
1619 is the first recorded incidence of slavery, so I would go with that as the latest.
Nah the Dutch Republic have you beaten by centuries with the 1571 Act of Abjuration, and that's just the first example that came to mind - the American revolution was the product of a looooong sequence of enlightenment ideas, not a unqiue snowflake shat out of the whole cloth by the founding fathers.
1604 is Jamestown, the first permanent settlement. My point is that we were never innocent.
1607.