This is worth a thread... https://twitter.com/headasploding/status/1248990465720016896

One of the things that is very different between my generation (boomers) and younger generations is how much, and by what means, we had access to information in our younger years....and what contextual filters were inserted into that information flow.

I got my first personal internet access account some time in the very early 1990s, when I bought my first personal computer. I was about 40 at the time. Online information resources were a tiny fraction of what they are today. Hell, Google didn’t even exist yet.

Computer use in a business context was fairly common, & individual desktop computers existed, but they were not nearly as common in private use; and most were not internet-connected. Most business computing was done on some kind of Unix or DOS mainframe with work stations.

In the late 1980s, I had exactly one friend who owned a PC, and he was a computer sciences grad student at Caltech. So people often forget today that the late 1980s/early 1990s was really still the infancy of personal computing. And the internet? Fuggetaboudit.

Prior to then, the intellectually curious got their information the way they’d ALWAYS gotten it for centuries—they went to libraries, and they read books. Also, they VALUED the oral history of those whose testimony bore DIRECT witness to the facts of certain historical events.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had a younger person dismiss YEARS of my own direct life experience as invalid, because it contradicted something they "learned" online. They put more faith in online information which confirms their own biases, than they do in eyewitnesses.

To be sure, ever since us boomers got access to vast information stores online, we’ve certainly been guilty of informational confirmation biases regarding current events. But we don’t HAVE to do that with past history. We either LIVED it, or we listened to those who HAD lived it.

We had no alternatives. We either read books, or we listened to others. Those were the choices. Heck, when I was a kid, we didn’t even a,ways have a TV. I was probably in the 6th grade when we got our first TV, a small 19” black and white unit.

There were no cable news outlets delivering 24 hour "news" with taking heads telling us what it was all supposed to mean, with a preferred narrative to be maintained. There was a "news hour", and the rest was entertainment. Later, there was an early and a late news hour....

....but the rest was STILL all entertainment programming. People still tended to get their more extended news coverage from newspapers, and the interpretation of that news's meanings from the newspapers' editorial columns.

A journalistic "bright line" was maintained between REPORTING, and EDITORIALIZING. That bright line of separation is no longer maintained today. When did that change? FOR ME, it changed with Walter Cronkite's report from Vietnam 1968 declaration that the war was lost...

....FIVE YEARS before the last US troops were withdrawn from Vietnam. One can argue—with some legitimacy—that Vietnam was a bad war. But MILITARILY SPEAKING, it was FAR from lost when Cronkite made his fateful broadcast. In fact, MILITARILY SPEAKING, we were winning the war.

We lost that war because we lost the political will to continue fighting it. And we lost the political will to continue fighting it because America’s "most trusted journalist" broadcast his opinion from the battlefield, instead of the military facts, …

… and in so doing, he killed out political will to continue fighting—and winning—it. Again, I repeat that this is NOT about whether or not Vietnam was a "good war". It’s just an example of a pivotal moment when a journalist went from reporting the facts to shaping the narrative.

In any case, PRIOR to this, because we boomers had to obtain our information about history through more direct means, we were forced to consider both context and personal experience. We didn’t have the "luxury" of unfettered access to information without qualifying context.

For instance, let’s consider the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It is common today for some to argue that the use of nukes on japan in WW2 was an inherently racist decision, noting that we didn’t drop nukes on Germany.

Absent any context, that SOUNDS plausible. But what are the contextual FACTS? Well, here’s a big one: the very first nuclear detonation in human history, the "Trinity" blast in New Mexico, didn’t even occur until AFTER Germany had already surrendered unconditionally.

Thus, there was not even a shred of militarily justifiable need to nuke Germany...let alone to drop any more conventional bombs on Germany. The war in the ETO was already over before the world's first nuclear bomb was ever tested.

This forces the honest student of history to consider balancing the human cost—both military AND civilian—of nuking Hiroshima and Nagasaki, against the military AND civilian human cost of a full scale invasion of Japan. In hindsight, the nukes win, hands down.

Those who have argued that Japan should have never been invaded, and should have simply been blockaded and cut off from the rest of the world, would have to argue the same fate for Germany to make their moral points consistent. Nothing short of unconditional surrender …

… was acceptable, and Japan would have never surrendered unconditionally without being brought to her knees as rapidly as possible. The atom bombs accomplished that, quickly, and ruthlessly, and in so doing, reduced the human cost had we invaded Japan.

I mention all of this for a reason.... I have a PERSONAL connection to that fateful decision to drop the nukes and its results. My own father was a WW2 Marine officer who was WIA at Iwo Jima. He was INTIMATELY acquainted with the fanatic dedication of the Japanese military man.

Dad was ALSO scheduled to land on the western facing beaches of southern Kyushu on D-Day of Operation Olympic, the invasion of the Japanese homeland, as a Marine rifle company commander. Olympic casualties were estimated to run into the hundreds of thousands.

About a year before his death from cancer in 1990, my dad and I were watching a news broadcast together, and the story was about Japanese students protesting the visit of a nuclear armed American naval ship to a Japanese port of call.

I remarked to him that I understood the students' reason for protesting, Japan still being the only nation that was ever nuked in anger by another. His war experience had made my dad a pacifist, but he replied that he didn’t feel bad at all about it.

He said, "They started it, and they wrote a check they could not cash. Furthermore, there is a high probability that I might not have survived d-day, and you and I would not be having this conversation today, if those bombs had not been dropped."

Now, my dad did not hate the Japanese, as many veterans of the pacific theater did. In fact, he had a profound respect for them. But he was NOT MORALLY CONFUSED about Japan’s role in the war, the realities of how the Japanese fought it, or about the use of the atomic bombs.

And this connects to me personally, because if those bombs had not been dropped, I, ME, PERSONALLY, might not be here today, typing these tweets, had those bombs NOT been used on Japan.

THAT is context that is not available to some random person doing internet "research" without accessing a personal connection to the information which provides that context. History is not limited to just bare facts. There is a HUMAN element to history which cannot be discounted.

And the human context is multifaceted. My all time favorite books on the first Civil War (a CW2 is real threat today) are Shelby Foote's "Civil War" trilogy, and the personal memoirs of Union General Grant, and Confederate General Longstreet.

Why? Because they include the HUMAN element. Foote's trilogy covers BOTH sides of the conflict as if they are both human, not numbers or ideologies. Grant and Longstreet both wrote their memoirs in the same voice...a HUMAN voice.

"Two factions disagreed about XYZ" does not tell you WHY somebody fired the first shot....and it is DEFINITELY that first shot that starts the war, NOT the fact that two factions disagreed about XYZ.

The US didn’t declare war on Japan over Japanese imperialism in the pacific—which had been going on for some time, in the face of US protests against it. The US declared war on Japan because Japan attacked Pearl Harbor.

Pearl Harbor was a culminating event in Japanese hegemony in the pacific, which led inexorably toward Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The killing of 250,000 Chinese and the Rape of Nanking were not enough to draw the US into a war with Japan. THAT required killing 1000s of Americans 1st.

Dry statistics teach you nothing without the human interpretation. So how does this differ from Cronkite's declaration that the Vietnam war was lost? Well, it differs in at least 3 ways.....

1. Cronkite made a declaration about a war that was still in process—the outcome of which had not yet been decided—and in so doing, HE determined its outcome. It wasn’t his determination to make.

2. He used his "trusted voice" as a bully pulpit to tell people what they should think, and because they trusted HIM, they thought it. In so doing, he transitioned from being one who disseminates information, to one who preaches its interpretation.

3. He launched a new version of "journalism" which took full advantage of its access to the news consumers' eyes and ears … and hence to their minds.

Journalism transitioned from being a profession that informs people of facts and then respects them enough to determine for themselves what those facts mean and then to act/vote accordingly, to being a profession that seeks to directly influence how people should act/vote.

Instead of examining previous history, with an eye to its human context, to inform themselves how they should respond to ongoing current events, people began to rely more and more on talking heads to tell them how to respond.

And in a world of nearly unlimited access to THO (Talking Heads Opinion) and data which is detached from its human context, we have ended up with a population of people who are functionally illiterate from the perspective of understanding history.

I’ll probably add to this thread as more thoughts on the matter come to me, but this is it for now.