When did America lose her innocence?

[formerrepuke]

It is such a tiresome notion, isn't it?
..feel free to add your own option
..and no, we're not talking about Emmy-award winning actress America Ferra, from the hit TV-show "Ugly Betty."

[SteppingRazor]

1. I think I agree with the notion of innocence being a bit silly, but...

what about Aug. 7, 1794, the Whiskey Rebellion? It marked the first time that, under the Constitution, the new government went from a bunch of revolutionaries to an establishment that put down revolutionaries.

[momster]

21. Whiskey Rebellion

This was my first thought as well. It's when the principles met reality head on.

[steel71]

26. When they murdered JFK

Then they took out RFK, MLK, John Lennon, and Malcom X (only after he stopped his militant views and promoted peace.)

Here's a question. Who would of been the President by now if he was still alive? He would of won hands down, total shoe in, not even a contest.

[SteppingRazor]

29. Right ... who's "they" again?

:tinfoilhat:

[Skarbrowe]

34. I don't think we were ever innocent, I went with "perceived" innocence.

My roommate told me just last night that she cheered when JFK was killed. She had been a lifelong Republican until I moved in in 1997. She gave me all this crap about how he messed up the Bay of Pigs, blah, blah, blah. This country was never an innocent country. We did a lot of horrible things. But, many of us perceived or thought out country was the greatest ever and JFK becoming President made so many of us feel like we were on this grand, beautiful awakening guiding us toward not only greatness but benevolence and love for the world. We all might have been high on something and I don't necessarily mean drugs and we could have been wrong, but it was what we felt. After the JFK (this is what I voted for), MLK and RFK assassinations, most of us knew the innocence was gone. Then as the years went on, we found out just how bad we had been. I still believe that we have tried, until recently, and that our Constitution had the best intentions even if it was originally written for land owning white males. It was possibly inadverdently written in a way that it could breath or change as the country changed.

Obviously, I've skipped over us coming over here and wiping out the Native peoples. I'm only addressing what we were after becoming a country. I suppose we lost our innocence the first time one human clubbed another one over the head.

[BlooInBloo]

2. 1492??? LOLOLOLOL! Is that option for the hopelessly stupid or something?

[Deep13]

16. nope

We were never innocent. This country is build with slave labor and near-slave labor on stolen land. The diseases alone that Europeans introduced wiped out much of the local population and blue-coated soldiers wiped out most of what was left.

[BlooInBloo]

19. Prosecution rests, your honor.

[Deep13]

20. Actually, that is just my opening statement.

If this was an actual trial for crimes against humanity, I would have a lot of actual evidence to produce, mostly in the form of records and demographics. Too bad all the defendants are dead by now.

[BlooInBloo]

22. You can keep going if you want to. I've rested.

[Deep13]

23. Yeah, it's Friday afternoon. I'll rest too.

Been fighting some virus all week anyway.

[Donnachaidh]

3. Tuesday, January 20, 1981 - Ronald Reagan's Inaugural

It's all been downhill since then.

[MessiahRp]

4. Lost innocence? No...

Innocence hasn't existed here since Columbus arrived and enslaved or slaughtered Native Americans in search of gold.

During the 1700s even with the squabbling over freedoms and impatience/unrest with the British Empire, the leaders of our future country were considered noble. Even the Brits for the most part strayed from war crimes and fought with us as if they were aware of the need to be allies in the future.

The problem is that we had continued to treat Natives and African-Americans as slaves, and even until the 1960s had legislation discriminating against civil rights.

Today currently we have such limitation on the rights of gay people.

There is no innocence when your entire existence is shrouded in violence and hatred.

Rp

[sheerjoy]

27. Oooo....what he/she said! Yeah! n/t

[Madspirit]

5. I picked "never"

Not because of the Revolution but because this country was built with slave labor on the dead bodies of the indigenous folk.
Lee

[MessiahRp]

7. That is the problem with all empires unfortunately.

Every great empire was built on the foresight and ideas of a few visionaries and on the backs of thousands of slaves.

Rp

[BlooInBloo]

6. (a) A nation born with slavery can never claim innocence...

(b) 1776 not being an option is fucking stupid, and

(c) A nation who has as part of its essential history the genocide of a race can never claim innocence.

[bobbie]

25. Very good point

A house built on a cesspool can't claim to have a good foundation.

[Az]

8. The first settlers

the First settlers here in the US came because they could not practice their brand of religious exclusion and intolerance to the degree they wished to in England. There has been no innocents here since then. Fortunately there have been those who have tried to right the wrongs we have done so we are not an utterly corrupt nation. We are as most things a balance between the two.

[Marnieworld]

9. Innocent? C'mon

With the Native American genocide and slavery this country was never innocent.

[some guy]

10. around 1492

I do realize the indigenous peoples weren't all peaceful, happy, and sharing. But the Americas were tainted, perhaps forever, by the first introduction of European influence of greed and conquest wrapped in Christianity.

In European countries, the idea of exceptional-ism has a hard time taking root, because in each country the peoples are similar to each other; but it showed some signs of life, for example, in the various Crusades. It found root in the Americas, and has flourished as "American exceptional-ism" (for inhabitants of the US, but not the rest of the Americas) and still clings to life today, as evidenced by those who still can't fathom why people in other countries would want to attack the US.

We're such good people, and only have the rest of the world's best interests in mind when we overthrow their governments, and prop up the dictators we put in place to rule their countries. :eyes: Or, well, okay, we may have been less than wonderful, before but that's in the past.

[dave_p]

11. Some say 19 Aug 1953

... but I prefer 12 Mar 1947.

It's all too easy for high ideals to cross the line into ideological fixation. The US was founded on the quest for a better way. The ease with a which yearning for freedom can be misappropriated as a vehicle for accepting intolerance and denial of the rights of others should be a lesson to us all.

[Blue_In_AK]

12. I don't know about America

but I personally did on November 22, 1963. That was the beginning of my political transformation at the tender age of 17. Before then, I never thought much about what was going on in the world -- other than being contually freaked out about getting blown to bits by a nuclear explosion, duck and cover, etc.

[baldguy]

13. Innocence, no. Naïveté, yes.

50 yrs of lies will do that.

JFK's murder broke it, Vietnam wore it down, Watergate blew the ashes away and the resurgence of the GOP since Reagan has contaminated the soil.

[Peregrine Took]

14. When we dropped the bomb on Japan - that began the whole military industrial

warfare state and its only gotten worse.

[frogcycle]

15. well, "innocence" is a stretch

with slavery, genocide against Native Americans, one can hardly say we were ever innocent.

To me, though, the Kennedy assassination was a major turning point. We were - just perhaps - on the brink of establishing a new era that might have at least approached "the age of aquarius" - maybe a national reconciliation of the wrongs of the past was in the offing - but that was terminated as abruptly as was JFK's life. LBJ ushered in an age of brutality and chicanery that has grown ever worse, with perhaps a slight slowing during Carter's tenure. Maybe some during Clinton too. But in neither of those periods did it reverse.

[Withywindle]

17. WTF is "innocence" anyway?

It's such a silly, romanticized concept.

Eden is a metaphor, not a concrete reality. Apes fight for dominance. And toddlers bash each other over the head with blocks and steal each others' toys as soon as they have the physical coordination to do so.

The idea of a nation having innocence is even sillier - no place with people in it is truly innocent, and never has been.

[Colobo]

18. The whole continent was born on the base of theft and explotation

The earth of the Americas has been fertilized with blood.

[bobbie]

24. When people realized that their gov't killed their president

Because he was a peacknik.

November 22, 1963.
Even if people won't admit the horrible truth outloud, they know something is terribly terribly wrong.

For example, how many fear that their preferred candidate will get the nomination or win the office and then they'll be killed?

[Aristus]

28. We've never been innocent, in that dewy-eyed, Norman Rockwell kind of way.

But if you forced me, I'd say when we removed the "He has waged cruel war..." paragraph from the Declaration of Independence so the slave-South would get on board the revolution train.

[DemGa]

30. Jamestown VA. 1607

First slaves were brought about 1619 I believe; so certainly lost it by then.

[karynnj]

31. None of the above

No nation is ever innocent - even before Europeans arrived, there were like some bad leaders.

[Perky]

32. When the first slave ship arrived.

[Colobo]

33. "America" was the name given to this side of the world, by the way

Everyone born on the Western Hemisphere is an American.

[grasswire]

35. while your last choice is interesting....

....I believe that generally speaking, our loss of individual and national innocence began with the knowledge that the government was lying to us about the Kennedy assassination. Then, of course, came the lying about Vietnam, the lying about Watergate, the lying about so many things, the coup attempt against Clinton, and now, of course, the creeping fascism.

[Warren DeMontague]

36. When Don Henley wrote that friggin' song about it. nt

[rasputin1952]

37. About 20 minutes after the Constitution was ratified...

we have always been a nation in turmoil. Right after the Constitution was ratified, a glaring omission was apparent, and the fight started over the Bill of rights. One of the main issues of the day was the cessation of slavery, not just the importation of slaves, which was to end in 1808 under the Constitution, but just ending the practice entirely.

Because the Founders refused to come to a conclusion, a cloud would lay over this nation right up until today. That cloud became larger and darker over the years w/events that came about, the Alien and Sedition Acts, the CW, Lincoln's assassination, the "Banana Wars", corporate takeovers, trusts, Civil Rights issues, the Kennedy assassination...the bush administration has just about done us in though, never before has this nation been under such unscrupulous rule, never before, throughout our history, have we been as threatened as under this administration. Pure evil needs to be dragged out into the sunlight and staked through the heart. The GOP is not the GOP of old, it is an evil thing, created from satan's bowels, and it needs to go the route of the Whigs...:(