I Am the New Black
Chapter One
Roots
Every good story I know starts at the very beginning, because like that white lady said in The Sound of Music, it’s a very good place to start. My story doesn’t start the day I was born, because that isn’t the very beginning. My story starts years before I was born.
In the 1950s, America decided it was a good idea to try to fight communism in tropical jungles on other side of the world. When JFK was president, he seemed to think we needed to help the Vietnamese, but that ultimately they would need to figure themselves out on their own. Once he died, Lyndon Johnson took office and became the guy who really made a big national issue out of it for us. President Johnson and his administration, in their infinite wisdom, tripled our military presence in Vietnam, basically upping the ante on some crazy idea of President Eisenhower’s from about ten years before. I don’t understand how anyone can like Ike.
Shouldn’t our presidents be given tests for common sense? I’m no military strategist, but I think the people in power from the late fifties through to the seventies were a bunch ...
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