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AmericaLife in 1940s MilwaukeeIn the 1940s Milwaukee was like leave it to Beaver country, an innocent city filled up with the simple life and good times. Milwaukee was a unique among American cities and throughout the ‘40s, ‘50s, ‘60s and ‘70s, Milwaukee was the quintessential American town, the best place in the world to call home. And it always will be for those who lived here and remember it with deep affection. Viewers of Happy Days and Lavern and Shirley can only imagine how much fun we had! I grew up in this all American 'Greatest Generation' city, 1930s - 1940s Milwaukee, Wisconsin into a primarily German partly Polish community made up of Catholics, Lutherans and a majority of Jews - and there were a few Irish/Scots and lots of refugees fleeing Nazi Germany too. Milwaukee was a heavy manufacturing, highly academic, European oriented city. When a Jewish holiday took place, my schools were emptied of many students and there would be only a few of us gentiles left attending. I found Jews to be just like anyone else, in fact, my first girl friends were Jewish. After World War II when Jewish refugees from European relocation camps immigrated to Milwaukee, we became intimately knowledgeable of the Holocaust. I gained first hand knowledge about the torture and genocide from survivors of Nazi-German extermination camps like Auschwitz and concentration camps such as Dachau and Belsen, in fact, my next door neighbor was a survivor forced into prostitution at one of the camps.Back then, Milwaukee was all about good union jobs in heavy industries, parks everywhere, beer, Harley Davidson motor cycles, mass transit on electric Trolleys, corner bars, sports - the Braves and The Packers, bowling, poodle skirts and saddle shoes for the girls, leather jackets, spade shoes and pompadour hair for the boys, swing and jitter bug dancing, drive in movies, cruising on Wisconsin Avenue, getting married right out of high school for the girls, getting a skilled apprenticeship union job or the military for the boys - a few went to college. Milwaukee was an immigrant driven city, mostly German, then Polish, the rest were Scandinavian, English, Scots, and my beloved Irish where I got my crazies from. My engineering and warrior side came from my German side. Religion was mostly Catholic, then liberal Congregational types and Jewish. Lots of Jews came from the German concentration work and death camps as refugees after WW II. Milwaukee is a buffet food city, you'll find a lot of beer, sausage, sauerkraut, cheese, and generally carb heavy fried foods and all kinds of fish. By the way, everyone learns to dance the Jewish Horah and Hava Nagila. Being on Lake Michigan and in the center of the country, Milwaukee is an International Sea Port and Transportation Depot for trains with connections to every city in the USA. You can even sail from Milwaukee onto the Mississippi down to New Orleans.Milwaukee was neat and clean, full of parks with lagoons and trees, and huge playgrounds filled with swings and organized activities surrounded every elementary or middle school. Since there were very few apartment buildings, everyone lived in a house and everyone kept their property up. We walked to school or took a city bus, rode our bikes everywhere, spent the week in Washington Park, went on week end camping trips, saw ten-cent movies and bought ten cent comic books. It’s easy enough to see why a lifestyle that embraces cheap beer, hot cars and motorcycles would speak to Milwaukeeans, but there’s also a blue-collar pragmatism inherent in a lifestyle that between drinks allows participants to hold down a job, raise a kid and maybe even pay down a mortgage. Times were so much better then, people were friendly, things were so much more innocent, there was very little crime and neighborhoods raised children. Things were just simpler and easier, back then, the movies were simple and had no fancy special effects. You could go to sleep with your doors unlocked. We didn't have all the technology then, no TV and only radio with Edward R Murrow and Gabriel Heater and JC Kaltenborn interspersed between the Longer Ranger and Shadow programs. It was family type movies with Dan Daily and Betty Gable musical time with Hopalong Cassidy matinees on Saturday afternoons. Children were raised with values and neighborhoods also raised children . . . and we lived in a village where everyone watched out for your kids.With WW II, rationing for food, gas and money curtailed a lot of our running around until the war ended in 1945. There were scrap (metal) drives, war bond drives and stamps for food or shoes and victory gardens on the home front. Young boys with their wagons and teenagers would go from house-to-house collecting aluminum of any sort or any other metals. The average gasoline ration was three gallons a week; the yearly butter ration was 12 lbs. per person 26% less than normal the yearly limit for canned goods 33 lbs., 13 lbs. under usual consumption levels; and people could buy only three new pairs of shoes a year. At school, we had "duck and cover" Civil Defense drills, when we ducked under our desks. We saved and reused all grease from the frying pan and butter was replaced with a tasteless margarine that had to have yellow color mixed into it. We saved tin foil and flattened tin cans for the war effort and of course had a victory garden in the back yard. Small as we were, we were given cardboard sheets showing the silhouettes of different kinds of airplanes so we could identify an enemy plane if it flew overhead. We never saw one, but we always looked. Our games included frequent shouts of "Bombs over Tokyo!" We had blackout curtains in all the windows and had to practice air raid drills, when we'd pull the curtains and turn out all the lights in an attempt to make Milwaukee invisible to enemy bombers.During the War, households often bought their annual supply of coal in April, May and June. If more was required, another half ton was taken toward the end of the season. After the war, and during the winter, the coalman came once a month to deliver coal to our house. They would back the coal truck into our driveway and my dad would watch so they didn’t hit the eves of the house. One time they did and my dad had to fix the broken wood. I can always remember my mom saying to the coalman "Mind the washing!" Coal was delivered by big burly men who hauled it from the truck to your basement window in canvas "buckets" they carried on their shoulder. They dumped it onto a metal chute they put in our basement window and the coal went into one of our two "Coal Bins ” and from there we shoveled it into the furnace. The hard coal went into one bin and the soft coal went into the other. We would get 500 pounds and up to a ton of coal at one time.I remember the coal delivery men, coming round the back of the truck, bent under their hundred pound coal bags, as they walked to our coal chute on the side of the house. The coal men were on piece work and had to deliver at least 15 tons of coal a day, all for just a few dollars per week. My father would offer them a cold beer if he was home and they always accepted. My neighbors were factory workers and all of them were thinking about enlisting. What with the war news, they knew that war is not a game or something to just joke and speak casually about. It was literally hell on earth. Bob Hawkins, a British immigrant, told us about his brother. He was a prisoner of war, and was captured by the Germans in Dunkirk. Bob got a letter from his brother about his march to the prisoner of war camp after he had been captured with the Germans. On his way during the grueling journey, a fellow countrymen fell to the ground no longer able to walk. The Germans not caring about the prisoner’s need for survival un holstered their guns with the intentions to shoot that man on the spot. Bob's brother stepped in the middle of them, and convinced them to allow him to carry the man the remainder of the distance, that distance being three miles. Jack came home on leave. He was dressed in his starched summer Marine uniform and he looked like a recruiting poster and he would soon be off to battle. I knew from that moment that I would enlist too when I grew up. I wanted to wear that proud outfit myself someday. I would have gone down and enlisted right away but there was one big problem standing in my way. I was only eight years old. I never felt so left out in my life. I would just have to wait until I was eighteen to enlist, and that would be in 1955.Kids playing Guns, during WW II was a huge activity, after all, Hitler was bombing London in the Blitz, food shortages, rationing, poverty, family members and neighbors in the military fighting the Germans or Japanese, war news on the radio every night — a hard life for us Milwaukee kids playing in the streets. In the early 40s toys were getting more advanced, but they all had sort of a war slant to them. Guns and military type toys were in every little boy’s hands. My dad made me a wooden Thompson machine gun I used to play 'Guns' with other kids. If there were enough kids out in the street, you could play football. My dad had the football he gave us to play with. It was a beat up old ball he had when he played college ball.After the War the troops came home. Refugees too! We heard all the combat stories after the war when the soldiers and sailors came home with their personal horrors of war. Starting in 1947 refugees from European relocation camps immigrated to Milwaukee and we became intimately knowledgeable of the Holocaust. We learned all about the torture and genocide of Nazi-German extermination camps like Auschwitz and concentration camps such as Dachau and Belsen, in fact, my next door neighbor was a survivor forced into prostitution at one of the camps. Most refugees were Jews, some were Catholics, a few were Gypsies and eastern European types. The Nazis murdered six million Jews gathered from Europe in the gas ovens, millions more were shot down in the fields all over Eurasia - Poland, Russia and anywhere the German army advanced in the Balkans. They murdered anyone they didn't like or felt were a threat to them like college professors, Masons and the academic class. We heard all about this in school, talked to survivors in or classrooms or with our neighbors next door. We all got a greater appreciation of life, morality, a man's ability for brutality and search for justice.At the end of WW II, millions of people were dead and millions homeless, the European economy had collapsed, and much of the European industrial infrastructure had been destroyed. The Soviet Union suffered enormous losses in the war against Germany. The Soviet population decreased by about 27 million during the war; of these, 8.7 million were combat deaths. The 19 million non-combat deaths had a variety of causes: starvation in the siege of Leningrad; conditions in German prisons and concentration camps; mass shootings of civilians; harsh labor in German industry; famine and disease; conditions in Soviet camps; and service in German or German-controlled military units fighting the Soviet Union.What young Milwaukeean did not get his first taste of brown mustard on a County Stadium hotdog sold by a vendor? Was there any better peach ice cream than that sold by Sealtest run by the Luick Dairy on Capitol Drive? Was there any better bottled root beer than Grandpa Graf's Creamy Top? Was there any better cookie than the Twilight Dessert made by Robert A. Johnston? Were there any better candy bars than Ziegler's Giant Bar or Sperry Candy's Denver Sandwich or Chicken Dinner? Was there any better hamburger than the one you could get at the Butter Bun on Wisconsin Avenue? And how about that almost sweet aroma emanating from the Red Star Yeast plant? Or the nose-holding stench coming from the Pfister Vogel tannery or the Milwaukee Road Shops in the Valley? Or the unforgettable odor of the Monkey House at the Washington Park Zoo? Or the sound of a bat hitting a hardball at the Eddie Matthews Bat-a-Way on South 27th?The 1950sIf you stepped into a late 1940s Milwaukee classroom you'd see teachers fostering 'critical thinking' in the classroom on a daily basis. This includes thinker’s guides which focus on the foundations of conceptualizing existential concepts and principles. It was all 'College Prep' education. If a student wasn't gaining anything from a college-prep curriculum they were given "life adjustment education." Basically, that was a 'technical education.' Girls making dresses, hats, learning to do laundry in the correct way and beauty culture and boys trained hard in physical education (football as well) which really kept the boys in shape for war. Growing numbers of young people soon filled technical schools. Schools taught lessons in family life, hygiene and health. The focus at Stueben JR and Washington SR high was academics, with nothing but college prep classes in Math, Science, English, History, Social Studies, and with elective courses in music, shop, sewing, and health. Being smart was the norm and the only standard accepted among us kids in those days. Flunk a course and you would be made fun of. You were always surrounded by creative people from all different ethnic types. It changed my life for the better. There were "sock hops" and the dancing style was "Jitter Bug" similar to the Jive dances of the 1950s. It was also the big band era and the likes of Benny Goodman would get the teenagers up and jitter bugging. Teenagers also learned to ballroom dance! Some girls went nuts over Frank Sinatra -- which I personally could not understand. My music hero was Frankie Lane.The NavyAfter graduating from high school, working 80 hours a week at two different jobs, with restless feet, needing adventure and wanting to see the world, I joined the regular Navy. This proved to be an exciting life, whereupon I experienced thousands of thrills, sailed many seas and oceans, including the waters of the north and south the Atlantic, Indian Oceans, and the Mediterranean, Caribbean, Red, Arabian Seas, and Mexican and Persian Gulfs. I have been to countless exotic ports, and sailed thru hurricanes, severe storms and experienced many high seas’ adventures. My ship was a warship, a Destroyer, the fighting backbone of the US Navy and my shipmates were from all over the United States, particularly the South. I loved the Navy life and still revere those wonderful years to this day. Being at sea for three years gave me the opportunity to indulge in one special pursuit; I collect destinations. I’ve always had wanderlust. It started as a child when I developed a keen interest in the Roman Empire and the mythology of the Knights of the Round Table. Now after many years of traveling, I still experience the excitement of discovery whenever I visit a new place.My high educational level got me very high military test job selection scores and into electronics, computers and high tech weapons. I found southern people were generally nice but not well educated, they had few skills, were very religious and most being bigoted against blacks, Jews, Catholics and Yankees. In fact there was an official government Jim Crow racial segregation practiced throughout the south that was violent and very mean spirited. In fact, there were loots of murders and lynching done against blacks and civil rights workers done by nasty white bigots and none ever got arrested much less went to jail.Life in 1950s NorfolkIt was 1956 and I was in the South now assigned to a Navy Destroyer in Norfolk which was an ugly and mean city. Was this what the south was like I asked? I found every day social life was very different from my home of Milwaukee. While Milwaukee was an open minded working man's society, liberal and socially generous, with thousands of things to do, the South was backward and low brow nasty, with nothing to do and racially legally segregated. If you had to make a comparison between good and evil, the south was definitely evil. Us northerners wondered how anyone could live here in this colorless and dull-witted society, hypocrites - full of Bible Belt evangelical religion but hateful to the core. Whereas in Milwaukee segregation between the races was social and very much class oriented, here in the South the races were separated by law which was vigorously enforced by the police and they seemed to relish harassing Blacks, military or civilian. By civilized Milwaukee standards, these southern police were psychopaths, escaped guards from Nazi Germany prison camps. Any type of non whites, including Asians, Puerto Ricans, Caribbean's, etc., didn’t get any respect and were treated terribly. If your skin was darker, you were legally separated into a lower class and discriminated against. Even the Jews, just like my childhood buddies from my old neighborhood, were held in low esteem and treated like garbage.The week I arrived in Norfolk, the State of Virginia closed down most of its public schools to avoid racial integration, and they remained closed for the next two years. Based on Brown vs. Board of Education, the Supreme Court had ruled that the South had to integrate its schools. Virginia refused to comply, instead, they set up private schools for whites across the state and established "Massive Resistance" to any integration plans from the Federal Government whom they hated. What are these Southerners? Evil incarnate or just misguided and stupid? I would never understand them! Aboard ship, I had made friends with many sailors, including Blacks, and when we went to Norfolk, we would experience a totally segregated society. On the ship regardless of race we all got along fine but we could not hang together on shore. There were many Blacks living in Norfolk, and they were cordoned off into very poor areas of town. Norfolk’s main downtown, ‘Granby Street’ and the entire city, with all of its parks and beaches, was available only for Whites. Blacks were allowed only in designated ‘Colored’ - run down - sections and a downtown area called ‘Church Street’ which actually had the character of a New York City street, colorful and full of itself.Even the rowdy East Main Street sailor Bars, known infamously throughout the world, were for Whites only. Bus stations, water fountains, hotels, taxi cabs, movie theaters, restaurants, city parks, swimming beaches, everything and everything were separated by race. The whites had all the best, the blacks - by law - all the worst. What fool invented this madness?! What a sick bunch of idiots thought this one up. This can't be the USA! But it was and I would have to learn to deal with it!Black and WhiteThere didn't seem to be much distinction between blacks and whites on the ship. It was during the Cold War and we were in it together, our guns being manned and ready by both black and white. Heck, James, the best bar room brawler I ever met, who saved my ass many times when I was on Military Police trying to break up Bar Fights in Europe, was black as the ace of spades, small but tough as a Red Oak, and scarier than a grinning Godzilla with gold teeth! Another friend of mine was a homicidal maniac dark colored Puerto Rican from Brooklyn who tipped the scales at around 5'3", had muscles in his breath and who I'm sure stayed up at night thinking of ways to dismember anyone who looked cross eyed at him and make it look like an accident. Other blacks were Cousins, he and I manned the Main Battle Gun Director together and Jack Hawkins who was the best three-inch gunner we had. We had a few tough blacks in Naval Infantry and when I was on desert patrol in the Persian Gulf, Eddie Duncan from Boston was my best friend and fearless war fighter, he was a great gunner and could handle himself in hand to hand. I felt safe with him by my side.1950s New York CityNorfolk was a wasteland of racial bigotry, evangelicalism, and nothing to do for love hungry sailors on weekend liberty, so lots of us northerners went to New York City. New York is all about the monuments and the museums, the pulsing crowds on Fifth Avenue, craziness of Times Square, funkiness of Greenwich Village, opera at the Met and stickball in Spanish Harlem, sardines on the subway, delis and pickle barrels on 8th Avenue, night clubbing in Times Square, dancing to the waltz -swing orchestras at Roseland, raunchiness at the Terminal Bar, ugliness of the Port Authority Bus Station, all night eats at the 11th Street Diner, and the romantic urban vistas of Central Park and its never ending free concerts: the culture (the high and the decidedly, thrillingly low) of Gotham awaits us. When night falls, the city moved indoors: into bars, cabarets, restaurants, nightclubs, and dance halls. War profits and soldiers' pay coursed into Manhattan nightlife and raised it to new heights. There were three main nationalities in the 50's: Italians, Irish and Jewish with lots of Puerto Ricans and Blacks immigrating from the south too; "the city" everyone knew meant, Manhattan, the subway, bus and the trolley were only a thin dime to ride; a great day was going to the beach at Coney Island, where Tuesday night was fireworks, there was no better hot dog then Nathan's in Coney Island and no better French fries than there thick ripple cuts; NYC streets were safe, there was almost no violence; people made a living and, rich or poor, everyone knew how to have a good time no matter of status; there were no divorces and few "one parent" families; there were no drugs or drug problems in the lives of most people; You bought sour pickles right out of the barrel - for a nickel - and they were delicious; for a nickel, you got into Ebbet's Field and saw the Dodgers play; Everyone went to a Bar Mitzvah even if you weren't Jewish and everyone took their date to Plum Beach for the submarine races.The Village was already and an electrifying time for the Bohemian set, and many of the prominent Beat writers were drawn there. During the 1950s, the Village hit its most active time, as musicians, poets, and especially visual artists began to flock there. Folk music blossomed in Greenwich Village, where clubs and coffee houses showcased singers like Pete Seeger and Odetta and nurtured a generation of newcomers, including Bob Dylan, Judy Collins and Peter, Paul and Mary. Two of the most exciting American movements were calling Greenwich Village their home, the Abstract Expressionists, and the New York School of Poets was sharing the same bars, restaurants, and lofts.In the fifties, the most popular places were ice cream parlors, pizza parlors, drive-ins, bowling alleys, coffee houses and record shops. The most popular and economical activity available for teenagers was watching movies. Other places teenagers went for fun were dances, school sporting events, sock hops, malt shops, and amusement parks. Dances, in particular, made up a large part of dating. Society encouraged women to marry young. Many American women, when they graduated high school, perceived that their further career choices were pretty much limited to being either a secretary, a nurse or a schoolteacher. Many women went to college to get a Mrs. degree. Pre-marital sex was considered sinful. "Going steady" was a stage young people took only if they were seriously on the path to marriage. Virginity was still a virtue in the fifties; and sailors on the prowl had to behave themselves.New York was defined in 1957 by the Broadway musical 'West Side Story' which opened at the Winter Garden Theatre in Manhattan featuring a musical score by Leonard Bernstein and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim; its story centered on two rival teenage gangs - the all-white Jets and the Puerto Rican Sharks - facing off on the streets of New York City. The play’s showcase number, “America,” dramatized the disparities between life in rural Puerto Rico and the opportunities available to immigrants living in the United States. Bernstein’s orchestrations drew heavily on Latin-style percussion and dance rhythms — sounds that had become prominent in New York over the course of the 1940s and 50s, as the city’s Latino population boomed.Available girls were everywhere . . . every color, shape and type, all hungering for a young sailor to pay them some attention. Nothing like evil, segregated, dry, violent and ugly Norfolk . . . which was just like the South everywhere, but not in the north where social freedoms still reined. Northern culture is very diverse and it made us all more tolerant. We could see how things can improve, and we know that most people are decent and good. Young girls crowed the streets and clubs all over Manhattan. They represented the last generation of innocence before it is "lost" in the sixties. When asked to imagine this lost group, images of bobbysoxers, letterman jackets, malt shops and sock hops come instantly to mind. Images like these are so classic, they, for a number of people, are "as American as apple pie."After the NavyAfter the Navy, I got an opportunity to be a Main Frame engineer for IBM, spent 2 and 1/2 years in school - finished first in my class - and was stationed at the naval base and went on never ending special TAD product support assignments all around the USA, especially to New York City which had the most and biggest computer applications in the USA. I also got involved in politics and Civil Rights, worked for Jack Kennedy and marched with Martin Luther King, all to work for equality. You could say that generally southerners: white - by culture, and black - by segregation, were educationally and culturally way behind northern peoples. And the whites were mean too . . . fighting Civil Rights to keep Jim Crow racial segregation in place.In the 60s, I moved to New York to teach Grad School in Greenwich Village. I had a great career in the computer industry as an engineering, sales and marketing manager for Banking and Fortune 500 accounts; went to Harvard Business School, wrote books, taught management development courses; was a national recruiter visiting engineering colleges, tech schools, and military based looking for high performance tech professionals and hired close to a thousand for NYC and Mid Atlantic operations. I was very sympathetic toward blacks since they suffered under racial segregation but found that generally they had poor educations and didn't qualify much for high tech jobs. I did my best to hire blacks and women who were highly inspired but also had to take into consideration job requirements. My companies revenue success and my job continuation depended upon being the best player in a very competitive market place. Kind of like NFL football or any professional sports.There are cultural things I found in different industries. Some parts of high tech industries were union environments, some were enclaves of IVY league educations and military weapons people like me, all requiring educations and skills to get high tech jobs and keep them in a rapidly advancing technology industry. It wasn't a space where I saw blacks - some, yes,. but very few. One of my customers, NYNEX, was filled with old time hard drinking Irish who hired people like themselves. The NYPD and NYFD was mostly Irish and family oriented, it was a father to son environment. Unions required seven year apprenticeships, entry to high tech was assured by ex military, tech school and MIT. Wall Street was IVY league, Harvard en all. Immigrants had the working class hotel jobs. Jews and Indians taught in the universities. The Greeks owned the Diner industry, the French the classy restaurants, the Muslims owned the Halal street carts. Unless it was professional sports where blacks excelled, except for white oriented Hockey, Blacks rarely fit in the business world where they had to have higher educational qualifications . . . and in NYC, family connections were very helpful.Affirmative ActionThen along affirmative action, a policy of favoring members of a disadvantaged group who currently suffer or historically have suffered from discrimination within a culture. But I had to fill high tech positions working in very tough NYC 24 X 7 environments. Was I going to lower the qualifications for a job? I think that at one point in the nation's history "carefully done" affirmative action was needed. That time is past. Is there racism, bigotry, sexism, etc? Of course there is. There always will be. The sane and rational people of the world are more concerned with hiring a person who they think is best suited for the job they are hiring for. When I go to the doctor I want to be confident that they got into medical school because they were the best. Here is a typically affirmative action scenario:Hi, I'm a white student with a 4.0 GPAHi, I'm a black student with a 2.0 GPAThe black man gets accepted into the university medical program based upon his color.Now I'm a patient, why the hell would I want someone operating on me because he got into school because he was black? I don't think so! The person who has the best grades, skills, etc. . . . should get accepted for any job, college, etc. . . . not based upon color of the skin.Pros of Affirmative ActionCreates diversity in college campuses and some businesses.Provides students starting at a disadvantage a boost.Draws people to areas of study and work they may never consider.Some stereotypes are broken with affirmative actionCreates equal opportunity for minorities and women in college admissionsMake up for past discrimination and prevent current discriminationActs as a desegregation program for upper educationHelp lead to a truly color-blind society.Cons of Affirmative ActionLeads to reverse discrimination.Lowers standards of accountability needed to push students or employees to perform better.Some students admitted on affirmative action are often ill-equipped to handle the school.Student chosen based on race and ethnic rather than how qualified they are.It is condescending to minorities to say they need affirmative action to succeed.Unfair, passes over better qualified individuals which leads to reverse discrimination.Race consciousness increases rather than promoting a color-blind justice.America Today in the 21st CenturySo here we are, fifty some odd years later; America has become a different nation; it always changes with the times, today it's high technology and globalism changing the national dynamic. But today something is broken in the American political system. The country is wallowing in pessimism and cultural conflict; Congress has an approval rate somewhere around 7 - 9 per cent and is useless as a governing body. For years technology has replaced blue collar jobs and globalism has increased competitive pressures and painfully changed the rules for economic development. Now demigods push racial reasons like non white immigration for the decline of the economic stability the average American. In today’s America, the predominant emotion among the majority of its citizens is dissatisfaction with not getting what they deserve, fear of the non white mixture brewing in America’s melting pot and anger with established political system. It happened before! Remember the 1960s social revolution? Traditionalists feared and fought it, but it happened anyway with dramatic organizational and moral changes to society and government. Society changed for the better, with things like Civil Rights for African Americans and women. Today the civil rights battles are being fought for woman controlling their own bodies, homosexual rights, and immigrants being recognized as an asset rather than as a problem.The USA is overwhelmed now with left and right crybaby dissenters. They complain and blame instead of exhilarate! Anti everything ideologues coming from a racial blend of black or white, evangelical religious nuts, all uneducated to the issues but full of righteousness, they think the worst of everything. And they are ruining my America! You can easily recognize them right off the bat, they have an enemies list, lots of things they don't like, they have an 'Us or Them' mentality. They believe they are right and non believers are wrong, there can be no compromise, for their views are sacrosanct. And do we ever have demigods! They are not lovers of humanity, innovation, imagination, science, intellect, but are contented with extremism, fears and anxieties, their minds full of conspiracy, threats and end times. They have got us pegged too, to them you are either a socialist, immoral or the worst, someone who is an open minded 'Free Thinker' and believes modernity and in the First Amendment and wants to change the world for the better.Worst of all, in today’s America, we share, in any meaningful sense, frighteningly few moments together. I believe this is a large part of why our politics are so maddeningly deadlocked. Today, it appears that we have divided ourselves into ever-shrinking tribes into silos isolated by our own truths which are encased in the bubble of our own self-serving realities. We are largely no longer the USA, but rather the Divided States of America.Even religion plays an ugly hand. Not a good guy anymore, but a firestorm builder. Once upon a time, the Christian faith had an overwhelming influence on every day life in America. But the evangelicals have soured the taste for religion what with their discriminations and fears towards others not like them. Contrary to popular belief, it was segregation — and not abortion — that mobilized the religious right in the 1960s and ‘70s. Conservative political activists worked to organize evangelicals around segregation as an issue of “religious freedom.” Today they organize to stop abortion and Gay Marriage. Evangelicals are also against non white immigration, free trade, environment and global warming. Prior to the 1970s, the relationship between evangelical Christians and the Republican party was negligible. In 2016, it’s hard to imagine a Republican party without its hard core evangelical voting bloc.I thought America was well past its ugly past - you know that slavery, Jim Crow, Ku Klux Klan thing - and we had grown into a more moral and altruistic nation like we were founded to be . . . that shinning light on the hill that illuminated the glimmers of hope throughout the world that looked to us for inspiration, freedom, better things and ideas.Enter misogynist – bigoted – lying – cheating Trump. The ugly side of America is exposed - something and foolishly I thought as dead, something we grew out of. He is voted into office intent on punishing both the political establishment inside the country and its many outside enemies, scrubbing the pot clean of whatever ingredients are unappetizing to the ordinary folks in the majority, and reinstating the American dream: “Make America great again!” Trump’s promise to scrub the melting pot and reinstate white majority rule was the second reason why Americans voted for him. As he made quite clear during his campaign, he dismissed accepted social norms of “political correctness” toward any minority and, without caring about whether he was accused of racism, misogyny or bigotry, he spoke in the name of the majority of “the forgotten men and women of our country,” vowing that ordinary people who work hard should have a voice, pledging “I am your voice.”America is not perfect and we suffered though great changes, from southern slavery into being a free nation, we manifested ourselves as a liberal democracy, won two world wars, fought a Cold War against communism, won Civil Rights battles, led the world's free economy and were a nation of ideas for the good life and betterment of mankind. That was my America! We were always moving forward and setting an example. It was so easy to see the divide in the USA back then. I think that today these are the same 'bones' for our present day division. It's more subtle today, a cultural, governing, religious, economic divide . . . something like between communism/fascism and democracy. You could even call it our own "Cold War." It manifest in adjectives like optimism verses, pessimism, theocracy verses secularism, progress verses regression, freedom verses restrictions, absolutism and monolithicism verses diversity. But underneath it all were very unhappy and angry people exhibiting a creeping ugliness that was boiling away . . . e.g.: like the Christian Right working on getting the USA to be a theocracy and the removal of separation of church state, the rise of white nationalism, my way or the highway thinking by outlawing other peoples freedoms - born that way homosexuality and women's choice for abortion, practicing religion and voting like you want to, stopping immigration especially from non white or Muslim countries and a paranoia toward modernity and open minded critical thinking.These days we are fighting Islamic terrorism, gun violence and mass shooting at home, a horrific black on black crime wave, nasty populist movements across the world [and in the USA too] seeming to move toward fascism. Our major problems are trying to understand and work with the impacts of highly advancing technology and competitive globalism, the resulting weakening of the old economy and loss of good jobs and the shrinking of the middle class. And enter Donald Trump! He will make America great again! Trump is an ugly person with hateful messaging, he personifies the ugliness, the fear and anger, he feeds it, lives off it, enables ugliness to being the new normal, which is seriously diminishing the greatness of the USA. Our bright light is dimming and only fervently glows now. What we need is a leader who shows us to create the new high tech economy the most people can succeed in.Yes, I have concerns; I think [in general] our government has gotten bloated, bureaucratic fat and sloppy. We have corrupt ideological politicians who work for their own selfish ends and not for the good of the country. There are too many people and corporations on the dole and even looking for more handouts (benefits and tax breaks), some actually expecting bailouts from the government. That includes the unethical "To big to fail" banks, protected government [oxymoron] workers getting can't be fired security with platinum benefits, the Wall Street mentality where anything goes to make a buck, health care that cost to much and provides limited results and misses the poor (we need a single payer system like Europe), the Christian Right that exhibits the worst bigotries, the South looking like the confederacy again and loving it, the bloated military industrial complex - its become a safety net jobs program e.g.: we don't need any more M1 Tanks, southern cultural backwardness Bible Belt mentality that loves the 19th century and is afraid of scientific modernity and social progress.So what happened to my country? We used to be the world's leader and now we follow the devil incarnate. We are terribly divided and our government is totally dysfunctional. What is next?

104.8 to over 186 million:The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression is a 1997 book by Stéphane Courtois, Nicolas Werth, Andrzej Paczkowski and several other European academics[note 1] documenting a history of political repressions by Communist states, including genocides, extrajudicial executions, deportations, killing population in labor camps and artificially created famines. The Black Book of Communism - WikipediaLate Victorian Holocausts - WikipediaFamine …Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World is a book by Mike Davis about the connection between political economy and global climate patterns, particularly El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO). By comparing ENSO episodes in different time periods and across countries, Davis explores the impact of colonialism and the introduction of capitalism, and the relation with famine in particular. Davis argues that "Millions died, not outside the 'modern world system', but in the very process of being forcibly incorporated into its economic and political structures. They died in the golden age of Liberal Capitalism; indeed, many were murdered ... by the theological application of the sacred principles of Smith, Bentham and Mill."[1]The book won the World History Association Book Prize in 2002.[2]Davis characterizes the Indian famines under the British Raj as "colonial genocide." Some scholars, including Niall Ferguson, have disputed this judgment, while others, including Adam Jones, have affirmed it.[3][4]…This book explores the impact of colonialism and the introduction of capitalism during the El Niño-Southern Oscillation related famines of 1876–1878, 1896–1897, and 1899–1902, in India, China, Brazil, Ethiopia, Korea, Vietnam, the Philippines and New Caledonia. It focuses on how colonialism and capitalism in British Indiaand elsewhere increased rural poverty and hunger while economic policies exacerbated famine. The book's main conclusion is that the deaths of 30–60 million people killed in famines all over the world during the later part of the 19th century were caused by laissez-faire and Malthusian economic ideology of the colonial governments. In addition to a preface and a short section on definitions, the book is broken into four parts: The Great Drought, 1876–1878; El Niño and the New Imperialism, 1888–1902; Decyphering ENSO; and The Political Ecology of Famine."Davis explicitly places his historical reconstruction of these catastrophes in the tradition inaugurated by Rosa Luxemburg in The Accumulation of Capital, where she sought to expose the dependence of the economic mechanisms of capitalist expansion on the infliction of ‘permanent violence’ on the South".[5] Davis argues, for example, that "Between 1875–1900—a period that included the worst famines in Indian history—annual grain exports increased from 3 to 10 million tons", equivalent to the annual nutrition of 25m people. "Indeed, by the turn of the century, India was supplying nearly a fifth of Britain’s wheat consumption at the cost of its own food security."[6]In addition, "Already saddled with a huge public debt that included reimbursing the stockholders of the East India Company and paying the costs of the 1857 revolt, India also had to finance British military supremacy in Asia. In addition to incessant proxy warfare with Russia on the Afghan frontier, the subcontinent’s masses also subsidized such far-flung adventures of the Indian Army as the occupation of Egypt, the invasion of Ethiopia, and the conquest of the Sudan. As a result, military expenditures never comprised less than 25 percent (34 percent including police) of India’s annual budget..."[7] As an example of the effects of both this and of the restructuring of the local economy to suit imperial needs (in Victorian Berar, the acreage of cotton doubled 1875–1900),[8] Davis notes that "During the famine of 1899–1900, when 143,000 Beraris died directly from starvation, the province exported not only thousands of bales of cotton but an incredible 747,000 bushels of grain."[9]The 30 to 60 million figure only covers the late 19th century; there where other famines like that before this period and after:Great Bengal famine of 1770 - WikipediaThe Great Bengal Famine of 1770 (Bengali: ৭৬-এর মন্বন্তর, Chhiattōrer monnōntór; lit The Famine of '76) was a famine between 1769 and 1773 (1176 to 1180 in the Bengali calendar) that affected the lower Gangetic plain of India from Bihar to the Bengal region. The famine is estimated to have caused the deaths about 10 million people.[2] Warren Hastings's 1772 report estimated that a third of the population in the affected region starved to death.[3]The famine is one of the many famines and famine-triggered epidemics that devastated the Indian subcontinent during the 18th and 19th century.[4][5][6] It is usually attributed to a combination of weather and the policies of the British East India Company. The start of the famine has been attributed to a failed monsoon in 1769 that caused widespread drought and two consecutive failed rice crops.[3] The poor infrastructure investments in pre-British period, devastation from war, and exploitative tax revenue maximisation policies of the British East India Company after 1765 crippled the economic resources of the rural population.[3][7] Nobel prize winning Indian economist Amartya Sen describes it as a man-made famine, noting that no previous famine had occurred in Bengal that century.[8]Great Famine (Ireland) - WikipediaThe Great Famine (Irish: an Gorta Mór, [anˠ ˈgɔɾˠt̪ˠa mˠoːɾˠ]), or the Great Hunger, was a period in Ireland between 1845 and 1849 of mass starvation, disease, and emigration.[1] With the most severely affected areas in the west and south of Ireland, where the Irish language was primarily spoken, the period was contemporaneously known in Irish as An Drochshaol,[2] loosely translated as the "hard times" (or literally, "The Bad Life"). The worst year of the period, that of "Black 47", is known in Irish as Bliain an Drochshaoil.[3][4] During the famine, about one million people died and a million more emigrated from Ireland,[5] causing the island's population to fall by between 20% and 25%.[6]The proximate cause of the famine was a natural event, a potato blight,[7]which infected potato crops throughout Europe during the 1840s, precipitating some 100,000 deaths in total in the worst affected areas and among similar tenant farmers of Europe. The food crisis influenced much of the unrest in the more widespread European Revolutions of 1848.[8]The event is sometimes referred to as the Irish Potato Famine, mostly outside Ireland.[9][10] The impact of the blight was exacerbated by political belief in laissez-faire economics.[11]Persian famine of 1917–1919 - WikipediaThe Persian famine of 1917–1919 was a period of widespread mass starvation and disease in Persia (Iran) under rule of Qajar dynasty during World War I. The famine took place in the occupied territory of Iran that had declared neutrality. So far, few historians have researched the famine, making it an understudied subject.According to the estimates acknowledged by the mainstream view, of the approximately 10 million people in Persia at the time, about 2 million people died between 1917 and 1919 because of hunger and from diseases, which included cholera, plague and typhus, as well as influenza infected by 1918 flu pandemic. A variety of factors are commented to have caused and contributed to the famine, including successive seasonal droughts, requisitioning and confiscation of foodstuffs by occupying armies, speculation, hoarding, war profiteering, and poor harvests.Bengal famine of 1943 - WikipediaThe Bengal famine of 1943 (Bengali: পঞ্চাশের মন্বন্তর pônchasher mônnôntôr) was a major famine of the Bengal province[B] in British Indiaduring World War II. An estimated 2.1–3 million,[A] out of a population of 60.3 million, died of starvation, or of malaria and other diseases aggravated by malnutrition, population displacement, unsanitary conditions and lack of health care. Millions were impoverished as the crisis overwhelmed large segments of the economy and social fabric. Historians have frequently characterised the famine as "man-made",[C]asserting that wartime colonial policies created and then exacerbated the crisis. A minority view holds that the famine arose from natural causes.[D].Bengal's economy was predominantly agrarian. In the years before the famine, between half and three-quarters of the rural poor were living in a "semi-starved condition".[10] Stagnant agricultural productivity and a stable land base were inadequate for the rapidly increasing population, resulting in both a long-term decline in the per capita availability of rice and growing numbers of land-poor or landless laborers.[E] A high proportion also laboured beneath a chronic and spiraling cycle of debt that ended in debt bondage and the loss of their landholdings due to land grabbing.[11][F] More proximate causes of the crisis involved large-scale natural disasters in southwestern Bengal and the consequences of the war. Military buildup and financing sparked war-time inflation, while land was appropriated from thousands of Bengalis. Following the Japanese occupation of Burma (modern Myanmar) rice imports were lost, then much of Bengal's market supplies and transport systems were disrupted by British "denial policies" for rice and boats (a "scorched earth" response to the occupation). The British government also pursued prioritised distribution of vital supplies to the military, civil servants and other "priority classes". These factors were compounded by restricted access to grain: domestic sources were constrained by emergency inter-provincial trade barriers, while access to international sources was largely denied by Churchill's War Cabinet, arguably due to a wartime shortage of shipping.[G]So the actual number of victims is likely closer to 45.1 to over 76 million deathsThere was also the casualties of colonial oppression more directly…Having just read Adam Hochschild's King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa, and followed up on its reviews and what I could find about the Congo Free State on the internet (such as this website). I'm aghast at the democide I missed. It is probably over many millions, possibly 10 million murdered or more from 1885 when The Berlin Conference formally recognized the Congo Free State (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo-formerly Zaire) to 1908 when Belgium took it over as a colony. The Congo Free State was the private land, not a colony, of King Leopold II of Belgium to do with whatever he wanted.And the massive killing did not stop when Belgium took it over.But amazingly, although the death toll is in the many millions, far exceeding what Germany did to the Hereros (I get a toll of 55,000), the incredible terror, slavery, and death imposed on the Congo natives by one man has been virtually ignored in books on genocide. For example, there is nothing on it in Chalk and Jonassohn's The History and Sociology of Genocide, Kuper's Genocide, and Charny's two-volume Encyclopedia of Genocide. There is one paragraph without estimates of the toll in Totten, Parsons, and Charny's Century of Genocide.This neglect cannot be due to lack of historical information. There was a vigorous international movement at the time led by the Congo Reform Movement, and involving many notables of the day, such as Mark Twain, Joseph Conrad, Booker T. Washington, and Bertrand Russell. Debates over what to do about the Congo involved the legislatures and Presidents, or Prime Ministers of the United States, England, France, and Germany. Yet, this democide far surpassed in human corpses most every democide in the 20th Century except that by Stalin, Mao, and Hitler. This mind-boggling democide has been flushed down the memory hole. Why this should be so is beyond this post, but should be the subject of study in itself.…As a result of all this, I've reevaluated the colonial toll. Where exploitation of a colony's natural resources or portering was carried out by forced labor (in effect slavery of a modern kind), as it was in all the European and Asian colonies, then the forced labor system built in its own death toll from beatings, punishment, coercion, terror, and forced deprivation. There were differences in the brutality of the system, the British being the least brutal and Leopold and the French, Germans, and Portuguese the worst. We all know what the Soviet gulag was like. These colonizers turned Africa into one giant gulag, with each colony being like a separate camp.As a result of this research, I'm willing to estimate that over all of colonized Africa and Asia 1900 to independence, the democide was something like 50 million. This is way above my original 870,000. Even 50 million may be too conservative. If this figure were roughly close, however, then I must raise my total murdered by governments in the 20th Century from 174,000,000 to 223,000,000. Exemplifying the Horror of European Colonization: Leopold's Congo…But these estimates are only a fraction of the overall democide among Indians that inhabited all the Americas. Before the conquest of the New World the Indian population may have numbered from 8,000,000 to 110,000,000;77 perhaps even 145,000,000.78 A moderate population estimate consistent with the latest research is of 55,000,000 Indians79Almost totally as a result of several waves of disease carried to the Americas by the conquering and colonizing Europeans, the Indian population dropped steeply by tens of millions, even possibly by as much as 95 percent.80 In Mexico alone the Indian population may have fallen by 23,000,000 to under 2,000,000.81 Including those Indians who were killed in warfare and democide, perhaps 60,000,000 to 80,000,000 Indians of Central and South American and the Caribbean died as "a result of the European invasion."82Judging what proportion of this mammoth toll constituted democide by the invading armies and colonists is hardly better than picking a number out of the air. No doubt there was much indiscriminate and outright murder. No doubt conditions were forcibly imposed on whole tribes that led to their rapid near extinction. No doubt large numbers of Indians died from inhuman treatment, especially under forced labor. And no doubt in some cases disease may have been knowingly spread.83 But even Professor David Stannard, author of the American Holocaust,84 who clearly blames Europeans for many of these deaths, is unwilling to give even a rough approximation of the "genocide."85 I found one overall estimate of 15,000,000 Indians killed in what appears to be democide, but this figure is given without citation or elaboration.86In any case, judging by the bloody history of this period of colonization throughout the Americas, a democide of 2,000,000 would seem a rough minimum and 15,000,000 dead a maximum. Even if these figures are remotely true, then this still make this subjugation of the Americas one of the bloodier, centuries long, democides in world history. PRE-20TH CENTURY GENOCIDE AND MASS MURDER…One kind of sacrifice must not go unmentioned, although virtually ignored in the literature. This is the sacrifice of colonial subjects through forced labor to satisfy private greed or state power. The work gangs of the 20th century gulags in the Soviet Union and Communist China are not an invention of our era. In some form or another they have always existed, as has forced labor to discharge fraudulent debts or contracts; or by contract with the head of a tribe. All the European colonial powers seemed to have extorted labor from their subjects in Africa, Asia, and the New World through such devices. For the Spanish, German, and Portuguese subjects, this was particularly deadly. In some cases the average colonial plantation or estate laborer may not have survived for more than a couple of years. It was sometimes easier or cheaper to "replenish the stock" than provide health maintaining food, clothing, medical care, and living quarters. I suspect that at a rock bottom minimum 10,000,000 colonial forced laborers must have died thusly.115 The true toll may have been several times this number. PRE-20TH CENTURY GENOCIDE AND MASS MURDER (several means like 3 to 4 several definition - Google Search so 10 to 40 millionAnd also the Atlantic slave trade:Jon Stewart: Slave trade caused 5 million deathsWe asked Comedy Central for Stewart’s source and did not hear back. But it seems likely Stewart got his information from another Daily Show guest. Historian Manisha Sinha from the University of Massachusetts was part of a panel in a mock game show called The Weakest Lincoln.Asked during the game to estimate the number of deaths, Sinha said 2 million to 5 million might have perished.So that would put Stewart on the high end of one estimate. But Stewart made an error in his characterization.Sinha was talking about the Atlantic slave trade, which included slaves bound for South America, the Caribbean as well as North America, while Stewart focused on the American slave trade.So what's the American share? Starting in the late 1960s, historians began culling hard numbers on the slave trade from shipping manifests and other original documents. The result is the Trans-Atlantic Slave Database. It has tabulated an estimated 80 percent of the traffic in human beings and found about 10.7 million people survived the passage from their homeland between 1500 and 1866. Of that, about 390,000 made it to North American soil. This was about 3 percent of the total.Historian Herbert Klein of Columbia and Stanford universities, who worked on the database, said that the data suggest about 85,000 people destined for North America did not survive the trip across the Atlantic -- far below 5 million. (The same data show deaths caused by the slave trade in all of North and South America at about 1.8 million.)However, as exact as this information might be, it only goes so far. Much data is missing, either because it was lost or because no records were kept of the illegal shipments of slaves to North America that took place after 1808. That was the year when the United States banned the importation of slaves from Africa.Plus, as we noted, the database counts only the deaths due to the capture and transport of slaves and says nothing about the people who died in bondage from brutality, disease and deprivation.When the Civil War began, about 4 million people lived in slavery. According to the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, half of all their babies died in the first year of life. That was twice the rate for white babies. Stanford Medical Schoolcites the statistic that in 1850, the life expectancy of slaves was four years less than for whites.Adding the aforementioned together we get 63.8 to over 110 million deaths from exploitation and genocide; but the data seems rather vague and arbitrary