Unfolding the Drag Chute

There is an inherent and well documented human resistance to change (9). If change happens outside of crisis — in essence, if we have time to think, instead of reacting — then we resist. It is just part of being human.

To the parts of the USA that were not part of the factory heart of America, there was no crisis. Farmers kept farming, oil patch workers kept drilling, miners kept mining, loggers kept logging and so on. Sure, there was a war on, but this was the Golden Age of Radio. Television was only a medium for news and reporting after World War 2 (10). Those not in the factories “heard” the effects of the war, but never “saw” them.

So, in these areas, there was never the social upheaval that occured in the cities when the men came home from war and the women and minorities were unwilling to go quietly back to 1932.

Most current Republican Senators were born as part of the post-war baby-boom, with an average age of 57 (11). They grew up in the “glory days” of stories of “when men were men and women were women”. America had just saved the world, was now the primary keeper of the light of freedom and did as it pleased globally to demonstrate just how well it’s way of doing things worked.

From my observations of the Republican party’s policies and actions, for better or for worse, this is the vision that the majority of “reasonable Republican’s” are trying to pursue. It is also one of the reasons for the success of the “Make America Great Again” slogan in the last campaign.

Almost every nation now part of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization was forced to make a similar decision. You can completely loose a war by only going “half in”, but you can only win a war by going “all in”.

Canada went all in, much as America did. As part of the British Commonwealth, we were hip-deep even before the Japanese declaration of war.