It is almost unimaginable today, but the length and breadth of destruction that was World War Two (WWII) has had a profound impact on our lives. Many significant impacts--culturally, economically, in terms of the workforce, in terms of our obligations around the world, etc. etc.
Nothing that has happened in this country over the last 60 years can be fully understood outside of the context of a post-war America. Unfortunately, people have short term memories or an ignorance of history; to those people, 2011 must seem mysterious indeed.
The nation faces a long, slow slog out of the deepest economic trouble this country has faced since the collapse of the stock market at the beginning of the Great Depression in 1929. TV pundits and politicians lament the state of education in America and the low test scores of students relative to other nations. The official unemployment rate hovers stubbornly just below 10%. Industry has fled to cheap labor overseas. As we roll forward into a new year, people wonder if the golden age of America has passed. Answers to this question can only come from a full understanding of what has come before us, and the most relevant place to start is the end of WWII.
Europe was still smoldering from the destruction of Germany. That destruction was total, from two directions--the Russians fought their way to Berlin from the East, while the allies (America, the United Kingdom and free France) fought to Berlin from the West. This left a ribbon of death and total destruction from the coast of France to Moscow.
The Japanese had broken China and had to be pushed off of a series of islands in the Pacific; bombing Japan in the later years of the war destroyed the infrastructure of most of that nation's largest cities. In short, the industrialized world had been levelled--factories lay in ruins, cities were piles of rubble, and workers wore uniforms. There was only one industrialized nation that stood unmolested in September, 1945; only one nation with its infrastructure and factories and workforce intact.
America.
In those years after the war we pledged to help our enemies rebuild. We loaned money to Europe and Japan to reconstruct their countries; our factories filled the gaps in need for "stuff," and they needed all kinds of stuff--cars, construction and mining equipment, toasters, generators, refrigerators, ovens, clothing, radios, food, and all the little things we take for granted that make life easier.
This made us kingmakers, put us on top. We stood alone above the rubble of the postwar world and supplied it with whatever the world needed; we had no competition for supply of the world's goods. Our economy made up half of the world's wealth.
This is the golden age of America that many reference for statistics on our economic health. You can see the problem with this--we had no competition for providing goods, the world needed everything we could make. It was a one-off situation, one not likely or desired to be repeated soon. As such, it is nothing we should compare to today, where we face competition from all corners of the globe. Even with our recent economic troubles and the oft-repeated warnings about the rise of China, we still account for a quarter of the world's wealth; China and Japan are vying for second place, but still in single digits--a distant second. The European Union alone has more wealth than the United States, and thats a compilation of 27 nations that still dont act as one--a technicality at 30 percent.
So the story of America since the end of WWII isn't a story of American decline, its a story of global reconstruction. It was inevitable that we should face competition again, inevitable that our wealth could not continue to dominate the world we rebuilt. We rebuilt it, in fact, to have competition, and our modern global economy ensures that the industrialized world's interests overlap and intertwine, hopefully staving off future conflicts.
What does this mean in terms of education? What does this mean in terms of our domestic economy? More on those later!
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