by Vince Coyner, American Thinker:
I grew up in the shadow of World War II. It had been over for almost 30 years by the time I started school. Nonetheless, WWII was probably the most talked about subject in my history classes throughout. But the funny thing is, as close as it was, it seemed like it was ancient history. It was finished. The evil Nazis were vanquished, and the world had moved on. America and her allies had won, and there were new enemies to slay.
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While too young to understand Vietnam when it was raging, by high school, I had a better grasp of world events, plus we were living on Guantanamo Bay, down in Cuba. Although today it’s more well known for its prison facilities, at the time, it was a U.S. Navy training/support station, and the enemy was the Soviets and Fidel Castro.
In the late 1980s, after college, I was stationed with the Army in West Germany. Our biggest alerts were usually related to the East Germans, who killed an American officer while I was there. I don’t remember all the details, but the Americans said he was on an approved inspection mission, and the East Germans said he was spying.
Image by Vince Coyner.
Throughout these decades, I always knew that America was on the right side of history. It was not that I’d been brainwashed, but it always seemed to me that an objective analysis of the circumstances, from WWII to Korea to Vietnam to the Cold War, revealed America as the good guy, trying to do what’s right. There’s a funny thing about the “good guy” framework, however: Everybody, even the guys who we know are the bad guys, think they’re the good guys!
Nor is it that I never questioned anything. In college (of course), I had professors who said the US was the bad guy in Vietnam and that the Soviets only built missiles to defend themselves against the imperialist Americans. I disagreed, but my words fell on deaf ears.
So now we are here, 35 years since the collapse of our last superpower enemy and a quarter century from 9/11, and I’m starting to wonder if America’s still the good guy.
Some time ago, it dawned on me that for most of my life, I had given the government the benefit of the doubt. Indeed, while imperfect and often inefficient and ineffective on a wide variety of policies, my default position for most of my life had been that the government was, at the end of the day, working for the American people.
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