OT- but not that much OT.
03/01/23, 10:50pm - I just found a new pet peeve. The local popular radio station (100.3 FM, though for you musical purists in the New York area I do typically listen to 92.3 in the afternoons and evenings) put up a challenge to its listeners to compress the entire history of the United States into a half-minute audio segment. Obviously, this is a rather daunting task, but my optimism about this little contest grew darker and darker with each entrant.
What's my problem? Nearly every person who called in simply listed each war that this country has been in. Everybody was pretty much saying stuff like "First Columbus came here, then first we won our independence from England, then we had a Civil War, then there was World War I and II, then Vietnam, and finally we were attacked on September 11th". I know that this passes for history in some classes, but I was frankly shocked that almost everybody completely ignored the social, political and technological developments of this country. The US didn't become a major global power because we dropped the bomb (please, no "set us up the" jokes here) on Japan, nor did it become so fruitful because we revolted against the Monarchy. The wars we've fought certainly have led to some evolution in our society, but they are only one aspect of our history. Here's a list of stuff that easily outrank, say, a mention of the Vietnam war or perhaps even the first world war in history from a perspective of importance to our development:
* The creation of baseball
* Defection of industrial technology from the UK in the late 19th century
* The cotton gin
* Invention of the integrated circuit
* The Stock Market (actually, I could probably just list all the "modern wonders" from the Civilization games, and I'd be half done!)
* Discovery of the properties of electricity and widespread implementation of an alternating current power network
* TCP/IP
* The Wright Brothers and the development of airline corporations
* Decision to base our currency on gold rather than silver
* Our hand in the creation of the new Israeli state
* Introduction of the large-scaled concept of entirely (or nearly so) advertising-based products (such as television shows, magazines, websites and computer programs). This one, in particular, was incredibly groundbreaking, as it enabled exponentially more widespread application of creativity in the marketplace, greatly increasing our capacity for growth.
* Invention of Plastic (and Silly Putty, while we're at it, though that has fewer practical applications).
* Implementation of cellular phone networks
* The Geneva Convention
* The Moon Landings
* Launch of the Pioneer and Voyager spacecrafts
* Rise and Fall of McCarthyism
* Changes in social opinion and legality of opium, cocaine, alcohol and marijuana
* Conquest of existing nations inside the continental US (the people who list wars often fail to mention this, because it's the longest war we had, and it was the one in which we were unequivocably the villains).
* late 19th century monopolies and "robber-barons", and the resulting formations of labour unions
* shift of population to urban sprawl (in 1810, only 10% of the population was city-based)
There's so much more to this country than even that above list. And most of the above events and shifts are just as important as any single war that this country has had. Yeah, you couldn't fit all the above and more into a thirty second spot, but you should at least shift some of the thirty seconds to mentions of things other than wars to balance out the history.
This is not a game like nethack. You're not supposed to summarize your history with a simple listing of the bad guys you've killed.
Think about this: If archaeologists a thousand years from now get the audio from this morning's broadcast and hear these compressed historical accounts of the country's development, then they would easily come to the conclusion that the United States was as advanced a nation as the Mongols and the Romans (I mean the HRE, not the Roman Romans) a thousand years before them. I, for one, would really like this country to be seen by future historians as something a little more civilized than a war machine.
Oh, wow. I just discovered that 'ls' (the unix file listing program) has parameters for sorting. Dunno how I missed that one. *_*
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