I was in late elementary and then junior high school during the height of McCarthyism. The father of one of the students at my junior high school, an air force officer, took it upon himself to come to our school library and check our books to see if any of them were com-symp. I was instinctively offended (but then my parents were pretty even-handed, although essentially conservative, and they had no use for censorship). I suspect it would depend on the influences on your thinking at the time. But clearly humans do at first tend, as a group, to go along, especially in the context of war or other fear-inspiring circumstances. We are still all too tribal, all too easily led, and all too short-sighted (for starters).

Of course, I also remember being in a distinct minority when I said on the school bus (we’re talking Orange County, Florida mid-50s) that I was happy segregated schools had been ruled unconstitutional. The real surprise, now that I look back on it, was that no one hit me and I was not ostracized, only looked on as a curiosity for that particular view.

I should imagine the list of things for which our grandchildren will be ashamed of us will be rather long, and it will include things that have inflicted permanent harm, which we tolerated long after we had every opportunity to recognize what we were doing.

As to whether we’ll remember, I’m reminded of the guest book. Several people had written things along the line of “interesting museum but we must never forget what these people did to us at that time as well”. Completely missing the point that these people were AMERICANS and many had been here for as long as any caucasian americans.

I took some panoramas out at the cemetery if anyone is interested:
http://360geographics.com/blog/index.php?entry=entry050807-213012

I come from drooling, inbred Appalachian cretins (Kentucky), so don’t write us all off. And remember the range - from Terry Sanford all the way the Jesse Helms - mountain Anglos are more like bipolar than anything else, although the rise of reactionary American conservatism certainly has a drooling, inbred, cretinous quality about it.

Waterfowler,

Peace, Love, and a Loaded .357 Magnum (everyone in San Francisco should have a hip-mounted howitzer).

Maine has winters that screen out all but the most hardy and desperate. If you look closely though, there are quite a few French Canadian and Native American names on the mail boxes, but you’re are right about the diversity. CA is well known for it’s mix of ethnicity, but here may a surprise - NC has booming populations of South and Central Americans, plus a large mix of African, Vietnamese, Chinese and Hmong. “NC! It’s not just for drooling inbred cretins, anymore!”

One of the things I like about California is the extreme range of races and cultures here - and they’re all mixing together. Give us another 3-4 generations and everybody will be a little of everything. We went to the Maine coast in the fall of 2000 and it was incredibly gorgeous, but I was flabbergasted at the homogeneity. It wasn’t that I didn’t see any German or Japanese or Italian names - I didn’t see any Irish names! We might as well have been in England. We stopped in Boston on the same trip, though, so that made up for it.