Yesterday I was in a conversation with a friend, who had an interesting question… He was in the process of watching the HBO series “the Pacific”, and also saw the news of the high school boys who were told to turn their t-shirts inside out because they had American flags on them (on Cinco de Mayo…). These two very disparate experiences caused him to pose the question as to how did we change? This strikes me as a fascinating area for endeavor since it skirts the morasses of current politics (as in keep as far away as possible…), as well as opens up areas such as 20th century history, the definition of what patriotism is, what is means to be a citizen, and a whole slew of other civics class topics.
Nowadays, these are interesting questions, but they are almost always immersed in some fractious political bickering so that there is never any real discussion or debate about the question itself… With due respect to a wide variety of political points of view related to some of these topics, I wonder if it would possible for you, the reader to try to look at these questions…it might be harder than you would wish, I know it is sometimes hard for me to get beyond my views to try to delve deeper.
As far as a civics class point of view, there are plenty of questions being implicitly asked in this situation, for instance how do we define the idea of a nation/state’s sovereignty? Has this changed lately, and if so, how, when, and why? With regard to WWII, how much of this war, and later wars are defined by changing mores? IS this revisionism? The countering point would be to state that there was a lot of easily digested propaganda during the war… Well, how do you define what the truth really is? IT seems to reside in a lot of places, and people seem to find wildly differing ones too…
This original question also lends itself to trying to describe just what we believe in these days, as well as trying to whether these beliefs have changed much over the years. I, personally find it rather frustrating at times since these questions are almost impossible to answer.
In any case, I think that the notion that we have changed is quite unassailable, and it begs some value judgments as to whether this is a good thing. This is also a maddeningly vague area to delve into since there are few if any easy answers…we have a patchwork of some good, some bad, some better, or worse…
About the only thing I could add to this jumble of questions would be that if we can define what our current values are…are they values if they change that much?
