Disillusionment

John finds out that what he always believed is not true:

Related to that, as an adult I’ve been finding that some of the cherished myths of my childhood were rather malevolent fictions. I grew up watching Walter Cronkite finish his broadcast with “That’s the way it was…”, but my studies of the Vietnam war, starting with “On Strategy” when I was in middle school, have shown me that he should have been saying “That’s the way I wish it was…”. Not that I totally fault him for that – as Solzhenitsyn put it, every human being has the right to a point of view. What I do fault Cronkite for is the deliberate suppression of alternate points of view while wearing the innocent “who farted?” expression of a con artist when the chickens came home to roost at CBS.

I hope that someday the truth about Vietnam will be believed. It's already known, but the alternative view has taken hold and is now akin to scripture. Like the belief that John Brown was a hero, when the truth is that he killed innocent men who didn't even own slaves.