Rewind all the stuff you got shoved at you in your early school years and re-evaluate things from a blank-slate perspective. It's not surprising (to me) in the least that those incidents happened under the flag of the United States. The entire thrust of the "history" "curriculum" that you received in primary and secondary school was propaganda and indoctrination, pure and simple. I've seen that in black-and-white on a written page in a formal teachers' curriculum handbook [2] that I managed to access -- outside of supervision -- back when I was in my early teens [1]. I was a cynical little bastard even then, but reading that took it to a whole new level. The entire point of "teaching" it was, and I have to paraphrase because I read the original a good 45 years ago, was to "convince absolutely the student of the superiority of the American way of government and society". Even at a "tender age" I was positively appalled to see such a thing in print: it echoed Nazi Germany quite loudly. My old man, who had an Ivy League education (when it meant something) told me to calm down, don't let on that you saw that, and you'll understand it fully in a few years' time. He was right, and I believe I was right to be righteously brassed off about it at the time.moonshadow wrote:All I can say is.... Jesus. It's almost inconceivable that this took place under an American flag. This is the type of thing you'd expect in the most totalitarian of states.
There was some experimentation in the 1960s and '70s with skirts for guys, mainly being driven by influences from across the Atlantic. I never saw a skirt on a guy (other than a formal kilt rig) until into the 1980s, but that didn't mean that there weren't assorted subversives playing with the notion earlier than that.And yes, if you read the article, though many of us may not fall in the LGBT group, it is clear that there is no way in hell we'd be allowed to wear our chosen skirts during that period.
[1] I believe the Statute of Limitations has expired on that one, else I'd not be mentioning it.
[2] One has to love small-town carelessness from time to time.