At a certain point (because I grew up in the 1950s) I knew people who talked to me personally about so much that is talked about in the above (now at netflix) experience of America.
I met many people who lived and had so many friends that died from unsafe medicines, not understanding what chemicals were in whatever they bought and their kids often were retarded or dead from breathing lead in Gasoline. I lived far enough out in the suburbs away from the greatest concentrations of exhaust in Los Angeles near the mountains. But many children were not as lucky as I. This was also true in Seattle where Lake Forest Park was idyllic as a place to be then. My father and mother and I lived on 2 1/2 acres of black cherry trees, Apple trees, boysenberries, raspberries, you name it. At three years old I could walk out my back door and pick right off the vine raspberries (my favorite) as well as boysenberries and black berries. In fact, black berries grew wild along the edges of the property on chain link fences to separate large tracts of land from each other then. IN the woods were frogs and frogs eggs, which reminded me of the galaxy when I picked up a thousand frogs eggs once to look at all the baby frogs inside their eggs moving before I gently put them back in the pond where my older cousin (likely 9 years old to my 4) likely found them.
Life was a wonder for me. But, then people would tell me awful stories from the beginning of the century, of the Great Depression caused by the stock market collapse of 1929 and of all the people they loved that died in world War II (over 900,000 Americans died in that war).
So, when people talk about 4000 dying in places like Iraq and Afghanistan I think about the 50,000 that died in Viet Nam and the 900,000 that died in World War II which was a part of my life growing up in the 1950s and 1960s when I was young.
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