Casual Observation

7 Comments

1. 

   lamh31 on October 1, 2010 at 3:29 pm

   So was this before or after Tuskegee?
   AA never forgot the scandal of the Tuskegee experiments, so is it any wonder that they would believe that he “government infected people with AIDS” conspiracy. It’s hard to trust your government when they literally decided to treat your people as lab rats and cattle for the better part of 200 years

   And yet people were shocked, I tell ya shocked about Rev Wright and the dumb AIDS meme. Of course it’s crazy to still believe it, but try to tell someone who vividly remembers a time when the government was aiding and abetting the klan and the like in terrorizing people, and you can kinda understand the paranoia a little bit.

   Add this story to that, and can understand the paranoia even more

2. 

   Richard Bachman on October 1, 2010 at 3:46 pm

   It always amazes me how so many people just do not want to accept that there is a very distasteful and sordid history out there surrounding many things that we have done in this country in the name of “freedom” and “liberty” during the last 220-plus years.  And there is nothing that will get the hackles up more on “patriotic Americans” than to point this out.  If one goes back and studies the real history surrounding what we have done, including what we did to the Native Americans in our “taming of the wild west”, it really does make one realize that in many ways during our history, we very often have not been the guys in the white hats.  We have been conquerors, often without conscience.  And while much of our efforts during American history have been noble and altruistic, there are untold thousands and thousand of incidents and actions that, if the truth were widely broadcast, would shame us all.

   We are not a perfect people.  We are not a perfect nation.  We like to look down our noses at so much of what we see in this world that seems positively abominable and evil.  But we have just as dark a past as many of the nations we so like to judge in the here and now.  We have just done a much better job in this country of pushing it down the memory hole and hiding it from our collective conscience.

   Take some time.  Read your history.  The real history.  Not the one we have polished and shined to a patriotic sheen.  If you do, I think you will, like me,  find it very humbling.  And it makes you much less quick to judge other people from an arrogant perch of American exceptionalism.

   • 

     Roodster on October 1, 2010 at 5:44 pm

     America has done some pretty exceptional things and witnessed the good works of some pretty exceptional people.  But American exceptionalism is as tired and worn an idea as sports hero adulation. It often ends up sucking as a matter of faith.  I’m with you on this.  History is a far better judgment tool than empty sloganeering.

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     netjunki on October 1, 2010 at 6:10 pm

     When I was working at the library in college I noticed a book on our “New Arrivals” called The Plutonium Files, about America’s experiments with radioactive materials on human subjects.  I already knew about the Tuskegee experiments, but this stuff was just horrific.  

     One of the chapters involved a hospital in Rochester than had been injecting people, who they figured had no chance of surviving their injuries, with radioactive material (Plutonium and Uranium if I remember correct) without their consent.  Some of these people actually managed to survive for many years with all sorts of weird symptoms related to the radioactivity in their bodies.  Horrifying stuff.

     Even before we were experimenting on humans… it’s not like we weren’t having problems with these kinds of issues as a “work safety” issue.  When glow in the dark faces and such were put onto watches and such this was done by people with a brush.  And many of these people would tip the brushes in their mouth… ingesting small amounts of Radium infused paint.  You can imaging the consequences.  Radium Girls

3. 

   nonynony on October 1, 2010 at 4:36 pm

   What?

   I guess you’re a much more positive person than myself (and I always think I’m erring too much on the Pollyana side of things).  Our history is fairly disgusting.  I mean you’ve got the whole slow genocide against the Native Americans that didn’t really end until the 20th century, the fact that the economy of the colonies was built on slavery and we didn’t realistically start looking at ending it until it was no longer useful to the economy of the country as a whole, the apartheid state that existed post-slavery that didn’t end until the middle of the 20th century, the horrors that the Federal government unleashed on labor that was attempting to organize itself, the forced internment of Japanese Americans into camps who weren’t even suspected of a crime beyond “being Japanese”, the various medical experiments we already know about that were performed on human subjects by the US Army and the CIA through the 20th century.

   That alone should be enough to convince anyone that, as a nation, the US has historically been capable of any abomination that any other nation is capable of.  Throw in our general attitude towards South America (i.e. it’s our playground and ours to do with as we please) and you have a situation where I’m utterly unsurprised that the “sainted” Harry Truman (who, we should recall, ordered the largest act of terrorism against a civilian population during wartime ever in order to end WWII) might have been in charge when something like this happened.  Disgusted, but unsurprised.

   • 

     Richard Bachman on October 1, 2010 at 4:43 pm

     AMERICA-HATER!!!  AMERICA-HATER!!!  

     You probably don’t even eat Freedom Fries. 🙂

   • 

     chocolate ink on October 1, 2010 at 7:08 pm

     Uranium mining on Navajo land that was not being and still isn’t being cleaned up continues the destruction of Native Americans.