I Wonder If Anything Is Really Different From The Past

[TheMastersNemesis]

I was watching Ken Burns epic documentary called "The War" on PBS. It was brutal, honest and graphic. And it was told in stories of individuals and how the war effected them.

There was one story of a woman who was in a Japanese prison camp as a young girl in Manila for three years. Burns interviewed her as an adult in this documentary. She and her family witnessed and went through horrible deprivation, poverty and extreme hunger. Many deaths occurred daily. She was finally liberated at the end.

When she and her family came back to the US she was shocked. In one of the final interviews she was telling how many Americans she ran into were just whining and complaining about the deprivation of coupons and rationing that they suffered through during the war. She commented how she and her family would just remain silent through such tirades dumbfounded.

[cali]

1. It's a great philosophical question.

Human nature doesn't change much, but I don't think your example is very good. Suffering isn't easily parsed in the long run, and complaining about the hardships of coupons etc, doesn't mean that people thought they suffered as much as people in Japanese prison camps or Concentration Camps across Europe.

[TheMastersNemesis]

4. From Their Own Point Of View They Suffered A Lot

What you said is probably true in many cases. It was interesting that the lady and her family did not share their story with such people. Back then society was more polite in certain ways.

What I did want to show is that there were a lot of disconnects even back during WWII. And if you look at who served statistically the 16 million who served were not the majority of the population itself. Sure every family was involved to some extent. Even more revealing is the fact of the relative few who actually participated in combat itself compared to the size of the over all forces.

What we forget is that many combat vets served on various campaigns and many fought almost the entire war. Today's Iraq and Afghanistan vets have served multiple times and that is similar to what WWII vets went through. What is not clear is how many WWII vets had PTSD like our present vets.

Now I am a Vietnam vet and I was in Vietnam. Being lucky to be given a mail clerk and company clerk shortly after I got there, I cannot claim to have suffered as much as my buddies in the field. I only had a small taste of that experience. I cannot imagine what some of the guys I knew very personally who were in combat operations the entire year I was there. At the time I did what I could to help and support them in my own way. Though in retrospect I can see how I could have done more.

It is all about awareness. What bothers me is not only the lack of awareness of suffering today but also the mean spiritedness that exists. If attacking the unemployed, disabled, and vulnerable is OK as a political tactic that actually works, it says volumes about how we have lost our soul in this country.

I am thankful that my wife and I are ok. But I feel pain when I see some of the deprivation around me. ANd we do give to people we encounter who need help.

[Sherman A1]

2. Where you stand,

depends upon where you sit.

No things are in many ways no different than the past. An example of this would be looking at our current political divisiveness and lack of civility then checking back through history. A brief stop at the Lincoln years will find the President called pretty much every name in the book and more.

[longship]

3. And when she was captive of the Japanese, she was no woman

She was a young girl, one of the many children captured in the Philippines and imprisoned for the duration.

Ken Burns' film was stunning. I have read a lot of WW II history and am not afraid of the horrors. But this film was a real revelation. I knew of all the death, but this was a grim reminder of how grim it actually was.

Thanks for the post. I watched all six episodes.

[TheMastersNemesis]

5. I Corrected My Post Thanx.

[longship]

6. You were correct. She was a woman when she was interviewed.

I found her story the most compelling of the series.

If I have one criticism, it is that Burns almost totally ignores the contribution of the navy. Other than the USS Indianapolis, there was little about the navy, and zero about the submarines, which sank six million tons of Japanese shipping during the war, more than any other service. The number of subs and crews sank was incredible. They paid dearly. My cousin lost his life along with all his shipmates on the USS Kete. Nobody knows how she went down. She just disappeared, probably due to Japanese action, some place in the Guam area. Japanese records are no help here.

There are so many stories about the war. I never tire of them. How people did what they did in spite of the adversity seems other-worldly to me. Maybe that is what makes history so damned fascinating.

But Burns' film brought the real horror to bear.

Thanks for your post.

[jerseyjack]

7. Attacking poor people as a political end...

My cousin, more right wing than anything else.. spends his mornings reading Rupert's, N.Y Post.

Anyway, he will go off on the 49% non-tax payers, national debt and other stuff.
Still, he does have sympathy for specifics such as the people we met in our bike trip to West Virginia in July.


All I have to do is remind him of the thousands of people shown on 60 Minutes. They drove for miles and waited in line for free health care because it was the only medical care they were going to get.

"Bob, do you think its a good idea that people in the world's richest country should wait in line for health care while the C.E.O.'s of insurance companies like United Healthcare earn millions? Remember Bob, your medical insurance company provides no health. It doesn't even provide one Bandaid."

We've done this three or four times over the years...

Bob: "Yeah, I guess you're right."

[Axiomat]

8. Ken Burns is Just Flat Out Brilliant

I could watch his documentaries nonstop. He's my idea of the much abused term "patriot", because he really raises the awareness of who we are as a nation.

[H2O Man]

9. Yes and no.

Today is a direct result of yesterday; yesterday a direct result of the day, week, month, year, decade, century et al before it. Hence, when most people speak of the "evolution" of humanity, they are speaking of mechanical evolution ..... which is confined to growth & decay. Hence, the evolution of human technology did create growth; but on its own, will surely cause decay.

In proper understanding of human evolution -- as opposed to the mechanical, organic evolution of life-forms on this living third stone from the sun -- it is exclusively the evolution of man's consciousness. And a man's consciousness cannot evolve unconsciously. In other words, when we look at obvious examples such as a Mitt Romney, we see an unconscious being. His level of awareness is restricted to the mechanical. And with millions of unconscious beings -- organic machines, which is all that most people are, because very few of our species evolves consciously -- can there be any other possibility than the on-going cruelty, violence, death and destruction that led you to post this thoughtful OP? No, of course not.

[caraher]

10. Yes

We're living here, now, and can do something about it.