* true about the generational lines, Moxie, and I see that plain as day.
That being said, I must first apologize to you and anyone who has read my post above for all of the misspellings contained in it. I dictated that is I was driving and I could not check it and did not have the reading glasses when I was stopped at traffic lights. Obviously, I should not be texting it on while I am in the car, and I am getting better at that. At any rate, to me there is a jarring lack of appreciation by our younger generations, particularly those in their 20s and younger, for history. Setting aside most of them don't care about history and find it "boring" or otherwise "useless for purposes of the job", it is precisely the reason why we have going on what we see in various parts of the world. Current events must be looked at through the prism of history and the fact that we in the USA are such young country, comparatively speaking, means we have a lot of catching up to do. At least, that is my opinion. That being said, it could be that our relative innocence, politically speaking, and viewing things in the world rather staunchly in terms of right and wrong (much easier during the Cold War paragraph where the old line Communist regimes were actively and loudly exporting Communist revolution around the world) made it easier for the United States of America to draw the lines in the sand and back that up with power to change large sections of the world for the better. For a country that really had no equal for many decades in the 20th century, the formation of the NATO alliance, the way Japan was treated after it was brought to peace by force and the Marshall Plan following the Second World War were things that most great powers were not celebrated for doing in the past, certainly not in the previous millennium. It was needed then and it worked.
That being said, the scars left over from the Sykes-Piot Agreement a little over a century ago is one of the last great political moves of the former world order is what really drives what is going on now between the Palestinian people, Lebanon, Israel, Yemen, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Syria and Iran. I had to explain to my younger kids why people in the West Bank and other areas were hurling insults at Great Britain and France as well as Israel and its great ally, USA. Indeed, the influence of the German Empire and even Italy in parts of Africa is not known to many people. Then we have Russian and all of its influence going back a long time, particularly with respect to the former Ottoman Empire which we now know as Turkey. The fall of the Ottoman Empire after the First World War was such an important time in modern history, and it was not handled well as we can see. I honestly do not know how it will ever be handled properly unless all of the nations that are currently involved were to go to a negotiating table for probably a year and rework their national frontier lines along the various ethnic and religious pockets in those areas to allow certain people that share certain ideals to live together and be separated from the others because of the unique mixture of ethnicity and religious zeal in that part of the world. Clearly there are parts of Iraq that should be part of its next-door neighbor against whom it has fought with over the years. Anyway, this is getting too long and I could go on and on. I do not know what the solution is, but it has to start with the changing of hearts across many different nations and groups of people. It will be a slow process.
