If you are a millennial, children born today will view Vietnam the way you view WWII in terms of distance in the past. In fact it’s further away

which means we can’t count on them gaining an ideology from ww2 and the struggle against totalitarianism. those stories are a bit too old now for most. we need to teach them that ourselves.

Actually, if this is the line you’re taking, this is probably good. American knowledge of history is extremely over indexed on WWII. Children should know as much about the Battles of Thermopylae and Port Arthur as they do Stalingrad (which they don’t even know bc it’s not the invasion of Normandy)

totally agree with you on this. i do think collective recent memory is powerful and hard to overcome, even if it’s much more logical to consider all of history