I have some REALLY good commenters. I deeply appreciate every instance one of you takes the time and effort to comment on my little trainwreck of a blog, but sometimes one comment pops up to really throw some light on the stage.

Like this one from “pdwalker” on my “Food for Thought – September 30” post where I opined about the celebrations over the 60th anniversary of the founding of Red China. The comment:

Two things you need to remember about the Chinese…

1/ They are *PROUD* of being Chinese. Their leaders past? Doesn’t matter worth a damn. They are *PROUD* to be Chinese.

2/ Most of the population of China were born after the mass deaths. Most don’t know about it. Only the older folks do, and they keep their mouths shut. For those under the age of 40-50, the cultural revolution is a vague and dim memory. For those under 30, they have lived during a period of increasing wealth, freedom and prosperity.

What then, should they be unhappy about?

Which, in my opinion is NOT a proverbial “two-edged sword”, it’s a nation-sized blender, and we’re in it.

You see, folks, our own people are doing the same things Step past the morbidity of the act and pass your eye over the obituaries for a week. See all those guys in their eighties dying? Those are the last of the Americans who SAW World War II. They saw what a political system running wild with theories could do when they shoved open the gates at places like Dachau and Bergen-Belsen. They saw what slavish adoration of the leader could do as kamikaze attacks pitted an enemy not afraid to die against America’s technical and numerical superiority.

Those were the generation of my parents. I had a dad who was a WW II veteran.

Five years past that was the Korean War, and a whole new set of lessons as again American lives went to the line against alien ideology. That generation saw what it meant when promotion of a political philosophy was done at the point of a bayonet. The first run was North Korea, and had it not been for a heroic stand at the Pusan perimeter by badly out-numbered Americans and a hand-full of Korean army, the peninsula would have been the play-toy of Kim Il Sung. By the end of the year we saw what it meant for freedom in the face of the dreams of communists as Chinese “human wave” attacks shoved an almost-victorious UN (mostly US) army back from the Korean-Chinese border. And we saw the first time in history where a military did NOT use everything it had for victory as Harry Truman fired General Douglas MacArthur for daring to demand the use of atomic weapons to force China back out of the war.

Even at the end of two conflicts that cost the lives of hundreds of thousands of Americans, American politicians still saw AMERICA in the terms of Ronald Reagan, “a bright shining city on a hill” and while there were political differences, both sides had a single goal, America on top of the world.

That’s what our parents remembered. They’d lived through it. But like the commenter said of the Chinese, “Most don’t know about it. Only the older folks do, and they keep their mouths shut. For those under the age of 40-50, the cultural revolution is a vague and dim memory. For those under 30, they have lived during a period of increasing wealth, freedom and prosperity.” And so it is with us.

Most of America doesn’t remember when politics stopped at the water’s edge. They don’t remember the disgust of seeing Jane Fonda touring North Viet Nam while her OWN COUNTRYMEN were fighting and dying in the south at the hands of the same smiling faces she was cuddling up with in the North.

They don’t understand the bad taste left when John F(******) Kerry sat in a senate hearing and lied about his exploits in Viet Nam to buddy up with politicians who’d happily sacrifice American soldiers for their own short-sighted political gains.

The same people don’t remember listening to parents worrying about polio epidemics, nor the Cuban Missile Crisis. They didn’t see the Berlin Wall go up, and most of them don’t understand the significance of it coming down, because after all, Marxism is just another political philosophy.

The clarity that shaped post WW II, the idea that we stood behind a flag, and that our friends stood behind our flag, or they stood behind the other flag, and the other flag was WRONG, EVIL, and not just a conflict of opinions, that idea is dead, buried under philosophies and nuances.

So it’s no wonder that we see the sky lit up to celebrate Red China. After all, the gray-headed old geezers who shuddered at the Chicom bugles in 1951 as they hunkered in holes in the frozen Korean hills, they’re almost all gone, and that whole silly idea about enemies who HATE our way of life, that’s so archaic, and if we just sit at the table and talk sensibly, we CAN all get along.