The ‘left’ wasn’t exactly treated with kid gloves at any time during the 20th century. Immediately before the 1960s we had McCarthyism instilling fear in Americans and costing people their livelihoods and sometimes their lives.
Plus the way civil rights workers were treated - certainly no better than the name-calling and alleged spitting on associated with Vietnam veterans. Most likely worse, since people asserting their rights were murdered by the rightwingers.
Neither ‘side’ seems to have been blameless as far as acts of ‘hatred’ is concerned.
While the majority of America’s military might have tried to do their time honorably, My Lai was not an ‘isolated incident’ - the whole war was a crime.
One consequence of the government’s ability to keep these war crimes secret for generations is that there will always be some folks who are inclined to believe government propaganda about the ‘pure motives’ of our government.
Side note: I meant to insert “bolding mine” into my post, but missed the edit window. My apologies for the change in the quote box without indicating I had done so.
So “Liberals” have difficulty understanding Right-Wing attitudes because they seem to be based on bullshit. Trying to understand what smells like bullshit takes more effort than it is worth, so the Left has a hard time empathizing with the right. This, I think, tends to seep over into areas where the Left could understand the right but are reluctant to wade through the sewer-swamp of nonsense in order to do it.
I believe the radioactive hatred present among a small, but very vocal number of Americans today, got it start during the turmoil of the 1960s and 1970s. Some of this hatred was engendered among white supremacists who were reacting against the desegregation and general Civil Rights movement. And even more of this hate was engendered among but thousands (not “a few”) of anti-war protesters who resorted to violence and lawlessness in many forms, and disrupting the functioning of entire university campuses over several years, and seemed not to care whom they hurt.
Several new generations have arrived since those times, and the younger ones seem not to know the history of the U.S. - even recent history. I don’t regard them in the same light in which I regard the Boomers (my own generation), some of whom perpetrated the violence, or sympathized or colluded with it. And who continue to view these actions as legitimate, even defensible.
I would emphasize that thousands - not a few - were involved with the near-anarchy of the late 1960s and early 1970s.
I would not say that “thousands” were involved in “near anarchy” but that thousands, nay, millions wanted to see the war end sooner rather than later. Most went the “peaceful protest” or electoral route.
“People had to actually learn how to protest. Not everyone got it right the first time, obviously.”
People like SDS, the Weather Underground, the Yippies knew perfectly well how they wanted to protest . . . some of them wrote manuals on the subject - and that’s precisely what they did.
These Americans and the Americans who allowed themselves to be drawn into their activities were living during the era of the non-violent protests organized by the Rev. Dr. King, whose activities and those of his followers had made notable inroads into the entrenched racism in U.S. society. And the older among these Americans would have been familiar with the non-violent approach to protest developed by Ghandi. An approach so successful that the then-powerful British empire was at last driven from India. This episode was an epic game-changer in that era, still much-discussed in the 1950s and the 1960s.
Had these anti-war protesters wished to protest non-violently, they had a domestic exemplar and an international exemplar, both of great fame, to imitate.
But then, a soul full of rage and hate probably wouldn’t be inclined to teach itself the ways of non-violent protest. Protests that take the form of invading buildings, holding hostages, setting off bombs, setting fires, general rioting, screaming obscenities, and making obscene gestures . . . these would seem to be much more the enraged soul’s cup of tea.
This observation would seem to demonize the Right, the very thing that everyone in this country seems to agree is a part of what continues to drive hate and division.
And I sense that a tu quoque is coming, so I’ll head it off by saying: it’s one thing to point out objectionable words and actions on the part of one’s adversary; it’s another to describe that the entire belief system of one’s adversary as “bullshit” and a “sewer-swamp of nonsense.”
I don’t believe that any reasonable American could dismiss the thought of George Weigel, for example, as a “sewer-swamp of nonsense.”
(If he had read some of his writings, of course.
And if he had the intellectual chops and wattage to understand them.)
I don’t know where you got the idea I’m blaming “millions of Americans.”
For what?
The actual numbers I don’t know, but it had to be thousands and thousands who were involved in the rioting, the campus takeovers, the general chaos of those times. And, apparently, judging from the spirit of the times (which I lived through) tens of thousands more agreed with them, or were at least somewhat sympathetic toward them.
A bigot is one so attached to his own opinions and prejudices that he cannot accord respect or even tolerance to those with views differing from his own.
One who is so strongly partial to his or her own group (e.g. religion, race, ethnicity, gender, political party, etc.) that he is intolerant of those who differ.
Simply holding views which are not politically correct and acting on them where lawful, doesn’t mean the person is a bigot.
It’s simply being an un-PC person.
There are surely also un-PC persons who are bigots. And bigots who are also very, very un-PC.
However, there are also uber-PC folks who are as much bigots in their way as Sheriff Buford T. Justice was in his.
And there are PC folks who are not particularly bigoted at all.
As well as un-PC folks who aren’t, either.
(I wish I could draw a Venn diagram on here. But I can’t.)
No, because capital punishment solves nothing. It helps no victims (being dead themselves), has very little deterrent effect (if even any) and validates barbarism. There is nothing to be gained by it.