Time to Learn from Our Mistakes

The war on terror, everyone knows about it, it's a part of our lives now you can't really get away from it. Just like the cold war. The cold war created fear of communism and a-bombs, people were always scared and were always preparing for something bad to happen. Now people are scared of the war but not to the same extreme as back then, people built bomb shelters and classes were taught what to do if a bomb went off, the government even had waning horns installed. Now people would probably just take out the iPhone and and ask it what to do, because it can save you. Living then was like living on the side of a volcano that could erupt at any moment. Yet today this war erupted in our home land, 9-11 the destruction it caused was horrible and yet it seems that they had more fear back then of being attacked then we do now. At home for both wars there was extreme hatred for the other nation. In the cold nationalism became huge everyone the young children growing up in it in particular grew so much hate for communist countries that they believed that America was the best and everyone else was wrong in what the thought and did. Another thing that is similar is the secrecy in government. Yeah now we have the news to tells us about everything going on every where, or do we? Are they told what they can and cannot show? Are they kept out of certain meetings and areas so we don't see everything that's going on? We truly will never know the government likes to seems like they are always up to something or that's what it looks like but then they always say they are innocent and maybe they are but ever since the cold war we really started questioning our government because they hid so much then. During the cold war they had the radio and some had TV to they were informed but they found out things they were not told, and anyone that spoke out against the government and the war was assumed to be a communist, and judged by everyone and attacked by the government, the freedom of speech was taken away. And now everything we do is checked so its almost the same thing maybe not as drastic but it's the same idea, what we do on the Internet can be checked now that we are at war, which can be could and could protect us from any more attacks from the inside. But are they going to far? In both situations congress granted the president power to declare war with the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution in the Cold War and the Iraq War Resolution in the War on Terror, and both wars became the longest wars in history, connection? The Taliban and Vietcong the people we were fighting against, both groups were fighting to take over the government and we didn't like what they believed in so we ended up fighting them. But the fighting was more proxy wars, more so in the cold war but also in the war on terror. All of the similarities really show in the actual fighting and the government but the home life just seems so different, during the Cold War everything was changing on the home front women's rolls were changing and everything that everyone knew was not the same anymore, now things have changed but me growing up in this war i haven't seen any huge changes. Maybe I was just too young when it started to see big changes. In both wars America had to spend a lot of money to support the troops, but during the Cold War people back home were told to cut back on consumption now we don't do that. During the Cold War people in America were more involved now people just think of it as some war that's going on way "over there" just like in WWI. Even the younger generation was involved, college students protested and knew what was going on in the war, grade school students had fathers and brothers that they would write to and schools had them in training for an A-bomb to drop people cared more. Now people don't really know what's going on, because it's not directly effecting them even though the fight actually came to America unlike the Cold War, it just doesn't make scene. Even though the 2 wars had a lot in common to people now they are a lot different especially on home life. If we could see the similarities in the actual war we might be able to learn from it but who knows if the government wants to see that. Maybe people now react different because they have grown from the Cold War maybe we actually got something out of it. There are many similarities in the wars but they are each different and unique in their own way.