Half the country was younger than 12 -- or not yet born -- when the Cold War ended

[pstokely]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/02/24/half-country-was-younger-than-12-or-not-yet-born-when-cold-war-ended/
"When I was growing up, tension with the Soviet Union was sort of a given. I was a kid when Ronald Reagan was president — Generation X — so while we generally understood that nuclear war was a possibility, the newness of the idea had sort of worn off for the country by then. When the Berlin Wall fell and the U.S.S.R. fell apart, it felt sort of inevitable in the way that major news events can feel to young people — one of a number of big things that happened that only kind of made sense.

Even that experience, though, is increasingly unusual in the United States. Census Bureau data from 2018 suggests that about half the country was under the age of 12 — or had not been born — when the Cold War ended in 1991. In other words, to nearly half of Americans, the Cold War is even more of an abstraction than it is to me, someone who had at the time what I can admit was a non-robust understanding of the situation.

This lack of familiarity with the existential threat of nuclear obliteration represented by a potent Russian state and, more specifically, the lack of exposure to the negative effects of the Soviet economic system have often been identified as key factors in younger Americans’ broader acceptance of socialism. Young people who weren’t witness to the Soviet Union’s occupation of Eastern Europe and to the country’s struggles under its communist system — and who weren’t exposed to the United States’ countervailing rhetoric — probably shouldn’t be expected to respond to socialism in the same way that older Americans do.

A poll from NPR, PBS NewsHour and Marist published this month suggests that younger Americans do, in fact, view socialism more favorably, though half still view the concept unfavorably."
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[MasonDreams]

1. Apples and Origins. A Private Prison System all but legalizes slavery and causes corruption.

Bernie and AOC do NOT want to nationalize the means of production. A county in Tennessee let a house burn to the ground 'cause the owner was behind on his taxes. The USSR was an authoritarian totalitarian almost dictatorship, same with China. We live in a representative democracy and you can vote for whatever you want. And then change it.