I have heard it said, many times in the last couple of years, “Our country has never been more divided.”
I say this divisiveness and distrust all started with the terrible treatment of President Obama and the right-wing shock-jock style of propaganda news.
My conservative friend, says different. He says the left was way worse in their treatment of President Bush and right wing media is a mere reaction to the liberal bias in media that has existed for decades.
If you go back a little further, we both agree that George Herbert Walker Bush had little to do with it and Bill Clinton had everything to do with it. Reagan, Carter, Ford, were appropriately partisan during a period when evil empires became a better target than our own constant reenactment of the civil war domestically.
Who I really blame for our present divide is Nixon and Watergate. That’s when we started really distrusting each other. Well, that and Vietnam. But that was Johnson’s deal.We were told by those who knew better than everyone else that there was a “Silent Majority” who supported the war, while a non-Silent movement fought tooth and nail to end it.
In the election just completed, the “silent minority from the right combination of electoral states” took over the course of history for awhile.
I also blame Tony Schwartz, a campaign ad guy, who I met in NY, many years ago. He is the guy who lit the fuse of divisiveness. He did the famous ad for Lyndon Johnson that reminded people that Barry Goldwater could not be trusted with the nuclear codes and was going to get innocent children, picking petals off a flower, blown to smithereens.
So, between that moment in the late 50’s and early 60’s with the start of the John Birch Society and the civil rights movement, we began to distrust each other and question each other’s patriotism.
I guess some could say it started with old Sen. Joe McCarthy, who ruined the lives of Communists and sympathizers and even many decent, honorable Americans who were called to testify before HUAC and got blacklisted. Eventually, people got tired of chasing commie ghosts, and people who were not Commies or even sympathizers, but actually just believed in “fairness” and shut down the 1950’s version of the Salem Witch Trials.
So really the last time we were united, I guess was for about a month after 9/11. Oh yeah, I guess we were united after the Kennedy Assassination for awhile. Obviously we were united during WWII, except for the internment camps. I understand we were united after World War II but in those days we didn’t talk about religion or politics.
Before WWII we were always united, except for labor strife, violence, hysteria over FDR’s reign and rebuke by the Supreme Court. WWI, Suffrage, Prohibition, the Depression and anti-immigrant sentiments held us back from unity during the first decades of the 20th century. I think it could have been somewhere right in there where we started distrusting each other.
Maybe you could go as far back as the assassination of Lincoln right after his re-election and the Civil War. Before that we were absolutely united as a great young country dependent economically on slave labor. Of course you can’t really count “race” as divisive factor because it didn’t divide white people and only lasted from the landing of the first slave ship until some point in the future.
Other than these brief periods in our history, we have always been a united country striving for freedom, equality and equity! And on that, my conservative friend and I might agree on some things and quarrel bitterly on the rest.
azenyardhen 