Comment by thomassmith65

I'm tempted to take apart that list of American evils, one by one, because in the cases with which I am familiar, it is Chomsky-level reductive, but that would take a few pages of writing. Again, there is a problem with this sort of discussion:

  This debate could continue forever since there's no single measure by which one can quantify how evil a nation is.

I wrestled over what I'm about to say, because it's condescending, but: it's one thing to read about the past, and it's another to live through it.

So many things feel real to me that might not if I were younger.

I grew up... surrounded by adults who lived through WWII, ...hoping for tens of millions suffering under Apartheid to be free, ...hoping for the Wall to come down and free hundreds of millions from Soviet oppression (not for ideological reasons, but because it was at North Korean levels), ...rooting for the Chinese protest movement to win. And so much more.

Thankfully, for the first half of my life, the world kept inching toward progress (and what I would give for young people to live through the 1990s!).

Then we had 9/11, and America embraced its worst side. That America is the only America young people know. That's a shame, because many of them now, politically, are sprinting straight towards the propeller-blades.