An Era of New Found Knowledge
Upon viewing The Sixties a Year that Shaped a Generation I personally have more of an emotion and thought process towards the whole subject of the Vietnam War. I have always personally view history as just that, history. To say the least, I had always thought it was cool to just learn what had happen in the past to see just exactly what steps had to be taken to have actually led me to this point in time and that’s all it was to me nothing more and nothing less. I was never able to really connect with history, I wasn’t one of those people who had famous ancestors or whose family was a part of some big movement so to me there was no way to connect with history and in that being so I could never like History. The only way I was ever able to connect with history was when I formed some sort of connection or some type of bond with the events of the past, which if most people knew would see me as being weird having to imagine myself in the dust bowl to be intrigued by it.
Likewise, when I was being told for the first time I would be looking through old letters to the Congressmen Biz Johnson during the Vietnam era I was both excited and a bit hesitant because after all it was history and I was obviously a fan of history. To my greatest surprise I was actively engaged and intrigued by all the letters, postcards, and telegrams I managed to surface though. At the time when I was reading though the many articles of history I couldn’t help but to get a nostalgic feeling of almost as if I was there feeling all the emotions and tensions as these people right the letters for the first time. I always kind of understood just how bad the Vietnam War was and the era around it, how the U.S citizens did not approve of the war at all. After watching the documentary, however my outlook about the whole era has dramatically changed from being merely just a point in time where a war happened to a point in time where the U.S. was falling apart.
I was one of those people who was under the impression that the Red Scare, fight for Civil Rights, the Hippie movement, Environmental movement, Pentagon Papers, Watergate, and Vietnam War and just all those big traumatic events were equally spaced out from one another throughout history. However as the documentary pointed out to me I could not have been any more wrong, they all happened relatively in matters of seconds from each other. I fully and truly did not know just how bad America was and just how many different scandals and events were happening at that time. To me it was just so interesting how through a time where so much was going on at a given point in that same time so much getting done such as civil rights being achieved as well as a new found movement in which as never been anticipated the Environmental movement.
When I first went through all the letters in my given stack it struck me to see how even veterans and ex-veterans were against the war and I could only make assumptions on why they felt the way in which they did. Then again after watching the video seeing how veterans would just throw away the medals they received during the war and burn their uniforms it completely blew me back. The fact that they were so easily able to do that when they just risked their lives in my eyes are counterintuitive, but I could never even begin to feel the way that they did. Something that also took me for a trip was the fact that the President had lied about an attack on the U.S. just to send out troops to Vietnam when they did not need to be there is just insane to me.
Seeing that how almost all the efforts being put into a war in which we almost had no business being in was so baffling. I now perfectly understand why veterans were ashamed of this country and why they didn’t want to accept what they had received, because they felt it wasn’t right. I understand why they could not feel good about themselves because essentially they were committing atrocities. Now I am not saying that I agree with those statements because I cannot, I don’t know enough nor was I there through it all to feel what they had felt.
Through this whole experience although I cannot understand what the people of this era were feeling I do empathize with them. I cannot imagine just what half of them might be feeling the amount of hatred and pain they must be going through is beyond what I could comprehend. I am glad however that I was given this opportunity to experience this historic time of history in a matter which I might not have even been able to do before, and now I have a completely new outlook in this time in history as well as history itself.
