The alt history of the end of the war

I have a special connection with the bombing of Hiroshima, as my birthday is August 6th, and, when I was a kid, we'd get these calendars with that date marked as "Hiroshima Day." In about Jr. High, I went to my school library to pick up a book about the bombing of Hiroshima, read it, then discovered another related event.

The "magic" of the Dewey decimal system puts Hiroshima and the Japanese internment in the same section, so, at my little Jr. High school library, next to the books about the bombing of Hiroshima, there was a book by a kid about my age who was taken from his home and placed in a prison camp, for having Japanese ancestors.

I was so surprised that "we" Americans had done such a thing to "them." I grew up in San Diego up until about 6th grade, so most of my friends were of Asian, Mexican and Western European ancestry. My family worked very hard to instill in us that "American" wasn't a race, it is a point of view. A point of view that, up until that time, did NOT include putting our citizens into prison camps. Until that time, I thought that was only something that the evil Nazis did.

That was my first indication that the government of the USA could and would rely on fear and false accusations to deprive its citizenry of their Constitutional rights. (Yeah, I knew about the Civil War, but still believed that the North was entirely good and the South entirely bad in that conflict.)

Recently, with the brouhaha over the WTC attacks on 9/11, we’ve been faced with the same problems, which basically amount to people acting from the reptilian part of their brain rather than the human part, plus the added benefit of getting to seize the property of persons falsely accused of being terrorists.

When all is said and done, I have to stick with what I believed about the American Experiment since I was a kid, and what has been reinforced by my continued study of humanity since then: The highest purpose to the Constitutional Republic of the United States of America is to protect individual liberty.

America' culture and beleifs do change

for example the word "handicap" refers to when a disabled person who was not able to work had to be out on a street corner, holding his cap in his hand, waiting on the generosity of others.

Back then, people were different. American were much more ready to help out their fellow man. Their views reflected that. They did not request any kind of help, because they felt that they should be able to take care of themselves.

Around the Great Depression it got so bad that Gov. programs were set up to help people out. That kinda changed peoples view of one another.
People no longer care about helping each other out. They see a person with one arm on the corner of the street and just pass them by, annoyed by the fact that the person could just ask for loads of money from the goverment to assist them.

We went from a "what we can do for our country, to a more what our country can do for us"

Don't get me wrong, a lot of problems that were created do lots of good. Public Education, National Parks, etc. but if people were more willing to help wach other out, maybe things wouldn't be so bad.