Last night I was feeling nostalgic, so watched some of the CNN decades series, the one produced by Tom Hanks. We saw a few eps from the Eighties & Nineties series in particular, since that's the decades SO & I came of age.
One of the episodes we watched was on the Reagan years & the end of the Cold War. I remember being a kid & being aware of the threat of nuclear war if tensions between the US & USSR boiled over. I also remember my age cohort got waaaaay cynical because of that.
Like we knew the adults on the planet weren't really adulting, it might cost the world its existence, & there was nothing we could do to stop it because we were just children.
I remember seeing stories on the news about the pro-democracy movements in Eastern Bloc nations, but I didn't really grasp the details.
I do remember when the Berlin Wall fell. I was in college when that happened. The USSR collapsed not long afterwards. It was pretty amazing to watch, because all of a sudden our global enemy was just... gone.
Without a war, too, that was an amazing thing. Not without violence, but without *war*.
It dawned on me that, for decades, the USSR had served as a means of defining what the US was *not*.
Positioning the USSR this way was part of the US' cultural & political identity for decades. & suddenly that was gone.
It isn't that ppl in the US hadn't turned on one another: of course we have. So many of our internal problems, then & now, are about conflict between different groups: racism, sexism, classism, etc. But for decades, we had an *external* enemy that politicians could use to 'unite' us: 'we're Americans & they're not'.
We don't have an external enemy like that anymore. We have tensions with Russia & China, but believe me when I say it was nothing like the tension between us & the former USSR.
& it's kind of fucked up, but I wonder if that lack of an identifiable externa enemy is one of the reasons why Americans are turning on each other so fiercely these days.
This is all very broad & general & I don't actually know if I'm right or not, I'm just spitballin' here.
@Impious_Jade While I understand and perhaps slightly agree with this, the state we're in has been a long term plan by the right for as long as I've been alive and I'm old. :) It's just been underground, using radio stations, church fliers etc but once they got to the 'overthrow government' part they had to come out into public light.
@TrueBloodNet Agreed, yes. They've been at this since at least the late 1970s, & right-wing elements have been part of US politics & culture for a long time. I'd wonder if the state we're in was made easier by the fall of the USSR. Right-wingers opposed the USSR for ages, & now that entity is gone, so more energy can be focused on targeting internal 'enemies'.
Maybe. I'm just spitballin' here, in the broadest way.
@TrueBloodNet I actually think there are a lot of factors all folding in to one another that have got us here. There's almost never just one root cause for stuff like <broad gesture> all this.
@Impious_Jade It's been going on since the early 60s or before. All the farmers heard hate talk on the radio while riding in their tractors and no one in MSM even noticed. They couldn't really get good TV reception out there in the sticks. Most their news came from church gossip and Hate Radio. That was long before USSR fell. This is why Biden is building cable to rural areas, to be sure they hear more than just hate radio.
@Impious_Jade
But also, we really didn't even unite against Saudi Arabia nor Afghanistan after 9-11 for more than a few months. Why? Because churches and hate radio were still focused on LGBTQ and PoC. That's why they were being killed long before USSR broke up.
What I believe is the main reason that we're seeing more of this internal hating is because White 'christian' folks are visually seeing they are losing control of the country.
@TrueBloodNet Yeah I wonder if it's an extinction burst. And I hella hope that the extinction comes after the burst.
& of course, it wasn't really 'all of a sudden', it took months & years of pushback & protest & pressures of all kinds to finally bring the USSR down.
The Berlin Wall coming down tho', that was one of those pinnacle moments, a singular point in time at which everything pivoted. We watched in real time as an entire nation *fell*.