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.
& 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*.
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.
@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.