Reply #4: I picked leaning toward yes.... [View All]

[tirechewer]

Their assassinations played a large part in the slide toward where we are today, but there were other things that eroded what we could have been as well. I don't know what would have happened if JFK had not been murdered too, but he was certainly leaning in a different direction then Johnson was. Medgar Evers was another charismatic and idealistic leader whose death cost us all dearly, even if we didn't realize it at the time.

The war in Viet Nam was a big corrosive factor in idealism and the trust Americans used to have in the government. I think the shooting of the students at Kent State had a huge effect on the people who remember it. Reagan was the beginning of the age of selfishness and the nadir of idealism. Bush sprang fully formed from Reagan's head like some kind of Satanic nightmare trying to put across the same ideas and finishing what Reagan started so subtly and affably that a lot of people never knew what hit them.