{"id":84898,"date":"2023-04-14T11:00:00","date_gmt":"2023-04-14T16:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=84898"},"modified":"2023-04-13T14:53:30","modified_gmt":"2023-04-13T19:53:30","slug":"controlled-demolition-part-ii","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=84898","title":{"rendered":"Controlled Demolition, Part II"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Wednesday, I wrote about the dreary history of demoralized, rootless societies<\/a>. I focused on France of 1940 – for whom the end of World War I was as recent as 9\/11 is today. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

France had an excuse, of course; out of 8 million Frenchmen that served in World War I, 3 million became casuaties; applied to America in World War II in proportional scale, that would have amounted to 4.5 million dead, wounded and missing. A million dead out of a 1914 population of 8 million, proportional to today’s United States, would amount to 11 million dead. Plus 20 more million maimed or disappeared. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

That’d be a tough hurdle to get over. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

America doesn’t have that excuse today – but we’ve been through similar emotional straits. The loss of about 58,000 in Vietnam, combined with a decade of social struggle and economic turmoil as America adjusted not-always-gracefully to being not the only functional economy in the world left us with a case of the national blues that was in full depressing fury when I was in junior high and high school. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Back then, America’s moral fundamentals were strong enough that when something came along to blast us out of the moral, intellectual and economic blahs, it was a little like the first bit of screen door weather in the spring:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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