CoachJim

“For many Americans, especially non-Christians, the thought that Christian morality can be a useful guide to much of anything is risible, particularly since so many white evangelicals from 2016 forward chose to throw in their lot with a solipsistic American president who bullies, boasts, and sneers. Yet Lewis’s life suggests that religiously inspired activism may hold one of the best hopes for those who aim to make the life of the nation more just.
(Page 10)”
― Jon Meacham, His Truth Is Marching On: John Lewis and the Power of Hope

“Historical time seems to have accelerated in America.

By the time children graduate from high school, the year in which they went into the first grade seems as remote as some prehistoric age of innocence: before the Fall. Once, the essential circumstances and assumptions of life changed so slowly that one could speak of may generations living and dying in the same age. Now events, non-events, fashions, and moods succeed one another so rapidly that an age can be over in half the length of a biological generation. Already, the twelve years from the inauguration of John Kennedy, in January 1961, to Richard Nixon’s second inauguration, in 1973, have taken on the shape and unity of an age. And the pace is unrelenting. As the United States celebrates its two-hundredth birthday, in 1976, the hopes that President Nixon expressed in his 1973 inaugural speech have been soaked in bitter irony by constitutional crisis and continuing national disunity.

from America in Our Time by Godfrey Hodgson (Page 3)”
― Godfrey Hodgson, America in Our Time: From World War II to Nixon What Happened and Why

“Here again, the common assumption about the inevitability of liberalism has led to constant underestimation of the power of anti liberal sentiments in America, We simply assume that, with time, people become enlightened. Yet the views of white Southerners did not change: not in the 1870s, when they fought against Black equality; not in the 1920s, when the second Klan spread across the South like wildfire; not in the 1960s, when George Wallace spoke for millions when he declared “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.” And not today when the unwarranted killing of Black people by police inspires for so many white Americans more sympathy for the police than for their victims.
(Page 91)”
― Robert Kagan, Rebellion: How Antiliberalism Is Tearing America Apart – Again

“It is becoming increasingly clear that, without an effective government, backed by a loyal military and some kind of national consensus in support of independence, we cannot do anything for South Vietnam. The economic and military power of the United States … must not be wasted in a futile attempt to save those who do not wish to be saved.”
(Page 399)”
― Fredrik Logevall, Choosing War: The Lost Chance for Peace and the Escalation of War in Vietnam by Fredrik Logevall