Whenever I venture off into the interwebs, I can’t help but notice folks seemingly going on and on about how things in this nation are the worst that they’ve ever been.
School shootings, police being ambushed, rioters under the guise of protest literally burning communities to the ground, are just a few of the things these folks are seeing in today’s society.
People seemingly act like all of this is some new and strange phenomenon, that we are circling the drain as a nation.
What’s going on in this nation now is just another somewhat sordid chapter among the many other preceding sordid chapters of American history.
Those who know our history and have lived through a bit of history of their own, up close and personal, might have the tendency to put all of this into it’s proper perspective.
Though I can’t speak for the 1880’s or the 1920’s, I can speak somewhat for the 60’s and 70’s. You couldn’t miss it. Walter Cronkite would come on the news every night and tell us all about it. There was always something going on.
Though the list of constant violence in this nation far exceeds anything I could ever hope to put to print, here a just a few highlights of just how messed up we’ve been throughout the years.
Terrorism
Between 1968 and 1973 there were over 2,500 bombs set off in this country by a various assortment of radical groups (Weather Underground and FALN to name just a few)
Anarchists
Anarchists are nothing new to this country either — In 1886, 8 anarchists were responsible for a bomb blast during a labor rally at Chicago’s Haymarket Square killing 11 people, including seven police officers, and further injuring more than 100 people.
Crazy people
Crazy people have been roaming the streets of America for generations. In 1927, 45 people (38 of them children) were killed when a school district treasurer, Andrew Kehoe, lined the Bath Consolidated School near Lansing, Mich., with hundreds of pounds of dynamite, and blew it up.
Each generation in this country has had to pay the price for political/corporate greed, racial strife, and bad government/economic policies.
If I seem calm and collected during some of our conversations, it’s not because I take lightly the events of the day, it’s because many of today’s outrageous events aren’t really that much different from all of the other preceding outrageous events.
Once you get a good unbiased look at this nations history, you may come to realize that what’s going on today in the United States is just business as usual.
