I've been reading a lot of angry crazy ranting stuff lately about how now is the worst time ever, and either death or fascism (take your pick) will find us all shortly, and it's all the fault of the people on the other side of some political bunfight or other.
Most of it is pretty devoid of historical perspective, and by that I mean stuff that everyone already knows. When the United States was founded, genocide, human slavery, and conquest-for-the-hell-of-it were not just present but widely accepted as part of the national experience. Some of that came to a head in a civil war that lasted five years, smashed whole cities, and killed something like 600,000 people, followed by a fucked-up, terrorism-plagued military occupation of half the country as the other half labored under essentially unrestricted crony-capitalist oligarchy. The next century began with a dumbass war with Spain followed by unapologetically bloody jungle counterinsurgency in the Philippines followed by a world war in which the US had anti-sedition laws so onerous that they were used to shut down a Revolutionary War drama for saying bad things about our allies the British. Meanwhile white people could hang black people from a tree whenever they wanted and get away with it. And so on and so on.
Smaller versions of some of this are still going on, our government is currently infested with fools, and more evil is no doubt in the offing sooner or later. But much of our outrage comes from having raised the bar really high, and that's actually something to be thankful for.
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syntheid
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Date: 2003-09-12 04:30 pm (UTC)Most of it is pretty devoid of historical perspective, and by that I mean stuff that everyone already knows. When the United States was founded, genocide, human slavery, and conquest-for-the-hell-of-it were not just present but widely accepted as part of the national experience. Some of that came to a head in a civil war that lasted five years, smashed whole cities, and killed something like 600,000 people, followed by a fucked-up, terrorism-plagued military occupation of half the country as the other half labored under essentially unrestricted crony-capitalist oligarchy. The next century began with a dumbass war with Spain followed by unapologetically bloody jungle counterinsurgency in the Philippines followed by a world war in which the US had anti-sedition laws so onerous that they were used to shut down a Revolutionary War drama for saying bad things about our allies the British. Meanwhile white people could hang black people from a tree whenever they wanted and get away with it. And so on and so on.
Smaller versions of some of this are still going on, our government is currently infested with fools, and more evil is no doubt in the offing sooner or later. But much of our outrage comes from having raised the bar really high, and that's actually something to be thankful for.