JUST HOW DID AMERICANS GROW TO SEE THE WORLD

History of our place is rich and you can start there. I did when I was just a little older than when my opinions started to form shape and by that, come to be what I perceive as reality based on a written history that I've been exposed to. It doesn't sound like much but it was.

My parents took me out of school after 2nd grade in Annandale and made me study very very hard all summer, endless summer, so I could be accepted at a school where, instead of learning about dragons, we learned Greek classical myth and history, and Latin, and French. That ate my 3rd and 4th grades. By the end of that I could forge a parent signature in under 12 seconds in the bathroom, at twilight.

More importantly though was our accommodations. They were, as usual, quite nice. My parents gave me 100% of the attic to live in and his bookshelves were at the top of the stairs to their room and the top of the stairs to my room. I was 10. I read them all. Lee's Lieutenants to Greek Myth I read everything and that included one of the few paperbacks, a book by Leon Uris. I read that a couple of times back then, under the covers on an old army spring bed with an old army sprung lamp. It was Exodus. I might have reread it in college on my own between volumes of history. No, that wasn't my major but I liked reading history.

That one book, read at just that age, shaped forever my view on the Middle East that gives the rest of the world conniptions. It helps that I spent most of a decade serving there but that's incidental.

At the age of 10 my fully formed thought for the rest of my life was based on that one book.

I do know exactly what the shabab trained little girls and boys learn and the little PLO and Hamas boys and girls learn at that age and I'm here to tell you, it's just about unshakable. The paths that knowledge delivered then, at that age, carves paths into the brain and memory that cannot be revoked.

Throughout the islamic world the saudis and emirates and the rest have been funding whole schools where the only thing taught is hate.

Oddly enough, nobody talks about it very much.

They're doing it right now right here in the United States and they've been doing it for generations in Western Europe, NATO, Turkey and the rest of the world such as Africa where they do things unimaginable to the West almost every single day but the West doesn't pay attention because Africa is huge and is mostly run by the Nazgul.