McFreedom

Professor Reynolds notes another unique American experience: not holding a grudge:

[T]he American experience of reconciliation after one of the world's bloodier and more divisive conflicts is one that perhaps ought to get more attention. It may be that, like so many things American, it is exceptional. But maybe not.

My wife's family is Jewish. There are whole sections of her family tree that never made it out of Eastern Europe during World War II and simply vanished in the Holocaust. Growing up, one of her best friends was a second-generation German whose grandfather had been a German soldier.

Literally, forty year before, this girl's grandfather had been a part of the machiniery that sucessfully executed much of my wife's grandparents' generation. In many other parts of the world, I've thought, that would be grounds for the two of them to try to kill each other. But in America, it's a historical curiosity. Something where, when you learn about it in school, the two of you say "Gee, isn't that funny," not where, when you are raised with bitterness and hatred from your earliest memory, you use it as an excuse to perpetuate violence.