Week 9_Christine Chau_ASA150E

Christine Chau
ASA150E
Week 9


In this week's theme of Post War Criticism and the Viet Nam Syndrome as Praxis, it brings me to a quote that I find controversial from Viet Nguyen's Just Forgetting, "People have a hard time letting go of their suffering. Out of a fear of the unknown, they prefer suffering that is familiar [...] As always, remembering and forgetting are in seesaw relationship, never, perhaps, to achieve equilibrium". As much as I can agree on why holding on to suffering seems familiar to people, often people do not realize that the reason why they hold on to history and what suffering has been done is due to the lack of recognition of the suffering people have gone through. When it comes to the post war and actually taking accountability of what happened, America took the war as a lost in their end, but a victory in having the veterans come home and a lesson learned. They never acknowledge the extensive damaged they have done in the countries in Asia. The amount of bombs placed, the amount of Agent Orange scattered throughout the vegetations, and the thousands of families displaced, is still being affected this day, 40 years after the war.


So now it brings me to the question of how do we keep our government accountable for these actions? How do we as an individual basis or community basis bring light into the continuing suffering of these people in the countries that have been affected by the war? I find the hardest part in doing so are educating the people who have been taught this false narrative of the war, the people whose generations have been taught that the war was a lost cause for the Americans, and that we had suffered the most in loses within the Viet Nam war. Many people are not educated on how many bombs were placed and how there are still millions in the land, or how the generations following have multiple birth defects leaving them as orphans. It baffles me to see people on social media being very uneducated about topics like these and believe that what America has done was right, or that the countries deserved it. How do we start a dialogue of what actually happened in the war?

I chose this image because it's probably how majority of America feels like in times of war, the passion and "greatness" for America.





Image: http://www.thebigchilli.com/feature-stories/americas-secret-war-and-the-bombing-of-southeast-asia