On Tue, 23 Jun 2009 16:56:47 -0700, jps wrote:

On Tue, 23 Jun 2009 18:42:20 -0500, Vic Smith
wrote:

On Tue, 23 Jun 2009 16:31:51 -0700, jps wrote:

On Tue, 23 Jun 2009 17:50:29 -0500, Vic Smith
wrote:

On Tue, 23 Jun 2009 17:50:28 -0400, Gene Kearns
wrote:



ROFL .... the Silent Majority ....was neither.....

This says otherwise, and conforms closely to my memory.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silent_majority

Oh sure, most of the silent majority expressed their views.
But not on the streets. Left it to the cops to bust heads.
I'll never forget something Ed Zieben, a WWII vet I worked with a few
miles from the Dem convention riots, said at the height of it.
We were hot, sweating, heat treating bull workers at IH, producing the
heavy machinery of America. And damn proud of it.
No time to smoke dope or throw **** at cops.
Pretty much like the Okies in Muskogee, except we lived in Chicago.
We finished a push into a furnace, and Ed ran a rag across his brow,
then looked at me and said...well actually yelled:
"One 500 pounder will scatter them ****ing hippies to hell."
Though I had no problem with the cops swinging their sticks,
I did view that as a mite extreme.
Things are more vocal now, from all sides.
We need more silence. Majorly.

--Vic

Those hippies were trying to stop a war that eventually took 50,000
American lives.

What did we get for it?

History isn't on your side.

Too bad the history is gone and I'm still here.

--Vic

If it hadn't have been for those hippies, it may have cost us another
50,000 Americans. You and I may have been among them.

I'd rather be here.

Ever see or read about time travel where tinkering with the past
affects the future? I'm sure you have.
Though you qualified what you said with "mays" it still reminds me of
that logical imperative.
Maybe if the hippies would have enlisted and fought, the war would
have been won, with fewer casualties, Pol Pot wouldn't have had his
killing fields in Cambodia, the Soviets would have succumbed ten years
earlier, and a cure for cancer would have been discovered.
Maybe not. Impossible to say.
Maybe if we hadn't fought at all, the commies would have been
encouraged to successfully foment revolution on a wider scale and at
an ultimately higher cost to us.
It was a different world then. Commies were our mortal enemies.
Maybe it all worked out just right - that's my view.
History only records the results of the paths we chose.
In any case, I did not welcome the hippies' proselytizing.
But it was their right.
And it was the cops' right to whack their heads when they got out of
line.
The hippies got us Richard Nixon and 6 more years of Viet Nam.
Anyway, here we are.

--Vic