I was born in '66; watched the last moon launch from our beach house on Cocoa Beach. It was a beautiful night launch. The rocket flames were huge and awe inspiring to my little mind.
Challenger I knew exploded almost immediately. Most of my neighbors and some of my family worked at KSC back then. And having seen almost everything that launched from there and the CC Air Force Station, when something goes wrong, it is obvious. I was hitting the heavy bag I had hanging under an oak tree, on the side of my parents house (needed to vent the rage and grief I was feeling after witnessing it) when my next door neighbor that worked in launch control came home. I had never seen him look like that before, it was like his wife or one of his children just died. I asked him if he knew the cause, and he said in a dejected, tired, grief filled voice "I don't know Mark. They just told us to collect all our data, turn it in, and go home."
The Berlin wall felt like a collective sigh from my POV. I concluded something important to the avoidance of nuclear conflict was happening. An olive branch of sorts. Again, that was my perspective, but it was a hopeful time in my mind. That was the threat many of us in this thread grew up with. The pall, the specter, of M.A.D.
OK City bombing was a WTF for me. I could not wrap my brain around how a fellow American could do something like that.
Branch Davidians were a big deal here in my area. Religious nuts abound here, and they were saying he was the lamb of god because of that stupid Demi Moore movie, the Seventh Sign. That's right, the compassionate, conservative, christians, were still whack jobs fervently waiting for Jesus' comeback tour. Regan was the antichrist because his first, middle, and last name had 6 letters. Clinton was the antichrist because he was popular, and they would quote the bible derp that they could best make fit their deluded hypothesis. And of course there was their continued boycotting and pearl clutching over Proctor&Gamble. If you don't know that one, you have to read about it. Because all of this conservatard derp you are currently witnessing has been building to a crescendo for many decades now. I hope I am preaching to the proverbial choir with that one.
Which brings us up to date. We are currently in the midst, of the culmination, of all these decades of conservatards being conditioned to believe anything that their demagogues tell them to. And reading what a holocaust survivor is saying, this is a lot like what it felt like to live in Germany in the 30's. Watching your countrymen get whipped into a rabid, foaming, frenzy, by a madman and his henchmen. While many become complicit through inaction, apathy, ignorance, fear, and anger. OH, and opportunism, mustn't forget that one.
