Okay then, but who did that?
Edith Wilson?
And Frances Cleveland. But I don’t think that’s who s/he was referring to.
My memory of living through the activities of the anti-war protesters of the 1960s and 1970s left me with the impression that as a result of these protests, this country was brought to the brink of anarchy. My memories are of angry, hate-filled mobs perpetrating rioting, bombing, looting, storming and holding of university buildings, constant screaming of chants, screaming of obscenities, and making obscene gestures, and that the atmosphere of near-anarchy was moderately pervasive on both coasts, not so much in the heartland, although heartland episodes did occur.
Much spitting may be ruled out.
The treatment you are talking about was mentioned in the recent Ken Burns PBS documentary. I say “mentioned” rather than “documented” because I don’t think he went into great detail about it. Whether or not it was “common” is a different question. Probably deepened on where you were and when you returned from the war and how obvious you were about being a veteran. I think W. Calley (of My Lai massacre fame) probably did a huge disservice to all the veterans who served honorably. And, of course, he committed what should have been considered war crimes. Along with others.
Calley seems to have lost his mind while serving, descending into madness. And his men with him. And they committed horrific war crimes against unarmed villagers.
Warrant Officer Hugh Thompson, a U.S. helicopter pilot spotted the ongoing situation as he flew over My-Lai. He landed several times during which he questioned the GIs present, and rescued several villagers. He immediately returned to his superiors and reported on what he saw. His commanders radioed to Calley and others to cease and desist their actions, which they did.
Calley and many others were court-martialed, and Calley served just 3-1/2 years in detention at Fort Benning. (I think he should have been shot)
Of the more than 9 million who served from 1964 to 1975, that a group of about fifty men went off the rails and committed war crimes, speaks volumes about the honor and decency of the vast majority of our servicemen and women who served in Vietnam.
Just to be clear, he served 3 1/2 years of house arrest. This was at Ft Benning, but it wasn’t in “the brig”.
I’ve heard varying degrees of the reception that was received. I am sure that there were some soldiers who were disrespected. What percentage, hard to say.
OTOH, the number of people involved in those greeting was actually very small. You are taking dozens, maybe even hundreds of people in total who gave these receptions. Random people with their own axes to grind.
That there were quite a number of other people on the left that never did anything like that at all is completely ignored. The 99.99% is judged by the actions of the .01%.
And that’s one of the problems with this whole “who started it?” line of argument. If some random guy that happens to have a similar enough ideology as myself on a subject or two upsets someone, that someone now feels justified in taking their anger out on me. Well, I ain’t done shit to deserve that, so I’m going to take my anger out on some random person that believes something similar to the thing the guy that angered me does. And so on.
I wan’t even born at the time that you are talking about, and yet, somehow, I am expected to defend the actions or accept punishment for them. Does that make any sense at all? It doesn’t to me.
We’ll never settle who started it, because whoever started it is long dead and gone, and we aren’t going to get any satisfaction out of digging him up and kicking him in the nuts.
Really, the question is, is who is refusing to let it go?
So, you would not want us to judge the armed forces by the actions of a small number of soldiers, but you have no problem judging an entire half of the population of your country by the actions of a few protestors?
I think instead of going back and forth over and over about which party is most at fault for the current state of our discourse, it would be time much better spent by each of us taking a long look at ourselves and asking “am I contributing to the problem, or am I making efforts to try to make things better?”. What happened in the past is in the past, the only thing we can control is how we are currently behaving and interacting and how we plan to do so in the future. We may never agree on how we got here, but the only ones that can fix it is us.
The media did not much cover the people who were not protesting at the time. They covered the stuff they found interesting, which was the screaming protesters. For most Americans, it was background noise, and we just got on with our lives. The media coverage made it seem a lot bigger than it actually was.
I understand that this is your position. Do you think you could explain why a majority disagrees, without blaming it on being lied to, or racism? And especially, do you think you could post such an explanation without someone jumping in to interject “no, it’s because they’re stupid and racist”?
There was a study linked to elsewhere in other threads about how well conservatives, moderates, and liberals, could predict what other groups thought about various issues, and why they would say they thought as they did. What they found was that conservatives and moderates were much better at both predicting, and explaining, what liberals thought and why they thought it. Liberals were much worse at both, when it came to understanding the other side(s). Do you think there might be some of that going on in the Democratic party?
Regards,
Shodan
Maybe. We learned about My Lai because one man, a chopper pilot, was courageous enough, aware enough of the career consequences, to report it in a way that could not be whitewashed as a defeat of a Viet Cong unit in a firefight. To believe it was an isolated incident requires believing that somehow the bulk of the crazies in the Army all wound up in Calley’s unit. Please don’t forget that he was acting under Medina’s orders (Medina denied it), derived from Koster’s orders.
My memories of the period all stem from wondering what the hell we were doing there, what the purpose of this thing was, why the body count (on both sides) mattered and was acceptable, and what victory was being defined as. I think it’s worth remembering that American wars had always been much shorter, victorious, and seen publicly as our being in the right. This was the first time such basic assumptions were doubted on a widespread scale, and since the political structure wasn’t doing its job responsibly, people had to actually learn how to protest. Not everyone got it right the first time, obviously.
The vets I’ve known have very often not wanted to discuss what they saw and did, ever. Not because they’re afraid of getting spat upon, but because they have trouble living with the memories.
Can you?
You know as well as I do the “two for one” trope floated to sell the Bill/Hillary presidency. You know as I do that Hill had an unprecedented hand in drafting legislation, to wit, the failed healthcare debacle. We all know that Hillary parlayed her time in the White House into a Senate bid, which opened up the way for her subsequent steps up the political ladder to her ultimate almost-successful Presidential bid.
Hillary’s use of her sketchy husband as a springboard into White House influence, in 1994 up through 2016, is a well-known matter of public record. If you want to pretend it didn’t happen, or play semantic games with my terms, fine, it’s your nickel, but it doesn’t do anyone any favors to ignore what happened there. Especially as Bill’s sins are aging so poorly in the context of the #MeToo movement.
So who “married into the Presidency”? And where is the “oligarchy”?
You do seem to be looking for rationalizations.
Post #140
What I see there is that conservatives appeal to the base emotions of fear, disgust, anger, stuff like that. IT is easy to predict how people will react to that. Progressives attempt to appeal to the emotions of compassion and empathy for your fellow human being, and that’s more of a mixed bag of results.
I’m still waiting to hear about all the times you voted across party lines. Whatever your answer, I am sure it will be illustrative of why we are so hateful.
All of this, but don’t forget about the draft. The draft was hated and feared by high school and college-age kids who did not want to be forced to participate in the military culture and fight in such a shit war. The draft damn near tore my family apart, with my father insisting it was my brother’s duty and my mother insisting that she would drive him to Canada herself if his number came up. I blame a lot of the animosity on the specter of being forcefully shipped off to fight.
Of course, the politicians tweaked the rules so that a certain privileged few could get their draft number downgraded, by being in college, or on a mission, or joining the Texas Air National Guard, so fighting the war eventually devolved to those who couldn’t avoid the draft. Which is why ML King described the Vietnam war as “a white man’s war, a black man’s fight.”
It was an ugly, unfair time.
Idon’t understand the connection of your second paragraph to your first. Can you provide a cite for the majority of Americans supporting voter ID laws being implemented in conjunction with programs intended to specifically make it difficult for some people to secure those IDs? That is what I am talking about and I’m pretty sure you know it, you’re focusing on people supporting ID laws, but ignoring the real world instances of the law being applied along with non-legislative actions by the state to make it harder for a segment of society to get the required document. Either you are for democracy or your not.