I think that Vietnam should have been either avoided or waged more aggressively, I have not decided which.
I am rarely entirely serious in these posts, but this is a recommendation made in complete seriousness. Before making up your mind, read Why Vietnam, by Archimedes L.A. Patti. It's close to 600 pages long, and tough going - the man was an Intelligence officer, not a novelist - but if ever there was an essential text, this is it. I don't care what conclusion anybody reaches after reading it, but anybody who hasn't read it doesn't belong in the discussion.
I think you may be missing the single most important positive impact of the '60's. The message of that decade was one of nonconformity. Imagine, think outside the box, do your own thing, dare to dream, and so on. A lot of the time this all led to ridiculous and tawdry dead ends. But if take the generation that came of age in the 60's, and follow them through the next 30 years, you see a period of unequalled imagination, innovation, progress. You see people thinking outside the box and coming up with astonishing ideas, ideas that changed economies and lives all over the world.
I believe that there is a direct relationship between the nonconformist "break out of the box" philosophy - the rejection of entrenched ideas - of the '60s and the creative surge that we saw applied in the subsequent decades. |
