Every generation, there's a new crop of young people to cheer the war on wildly, too thrilled with the excitement to listen to older people muttering about "death" and "maiming" and "this is going to last longer than you think."
Re: Vietnam, it was the first American war that wasn't heralded in by big cheering parades and the boys in uniform marching through the town while the girls toss flowers, apparently because Lyndon B. Johnson wasn't sure that there was enough grassroots support for people to get into the spirit of things. (It was also perhaps the first American war where we had technically kind of been at war for a while before the first big troop surge.) He may have been right, but I also wonder if the traditional parades would have created/bolstered the grassroots support that the war so catastrophically lost.
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2025-04-15 03:09 pm (UTC)Re: Vietnam, it was the first American war that wasn't heralded in by big cheering parades and the boys in uniform marching through the town while the girls toss flowers, apparently because Lyndon B. Johnson wasn't sure that there was enough grassroots support for people to get into the spirit of things. (It was also perhaps the first American war where we had technically kind of been at war for a while before the first big troop surge.) He may have been right, but I also wonder if the traditional parades would have created/bolstered the grassroots support that the war so catastrophically lost.