To start with, we must understand the atmosphere of the times. As with anything this big, there is no one cause, and most of the factors involved are so subtle that they have gone by unnoticed. This being true, we will still try to find the root of this change in societal values. First, there are the people: the baby boomers. This term refers to a generation of children born after the Second World War, when government intervention due to the depression and profits from a major war had provided a better way of life and the proper economic atmosphere for huge birthrates in western countries, especially in the United States. So babies were plentiful, appearing in numbers that had never before been seen. Their parents, having lived through the depression and a horrific World War, wanted to ensure that their children had a much easier and happier life than they had. They created the suburbs, a quiet, peaceful way of life that followed the American dream. New technology also had its role in this: the car, now made affordable to everyone, provided a means of transportation so that living in outlying areas didn't prevent Dad from being able to work in the city (what about Mom? What? You thought that she'd be working? Didn't you ever see "Leave it to Beaver"?); the assembly line, while not exactly new, had become nearly perfected, and required less and less human involvement, which created more white-collar administrative jobs; the television, now common in every household, provided good, wholesome family entertainment like Ed Sullivan and American Bandstand. What a wonderful way to live, surround by elms and picket fences, right? Wrong. These children, unfortunately (?), grew up in a time of great civil unrest. Segregation was down on its knees, and even its most vehement supporters were disappearing. Communism was raging across the Eastern hemisphere, and a bit in the West, and it was America's job do make sure that it was defeated. This meant that the four presidents of the era, Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy and especially Johnson's foreign policy was to support any country trying to fight off the Red Machine and crush any country that was supporting it. The first indication that this was flawed came in Korea, where after years of fighting that resulted in high American casualties, the border between North and South returned to exactly where it was. But the real problem came in the former region of Indochina, or Vietnam, which had recently freed itself after years of colonial oppression. While Ho Chi Minh, the liberator, was mainly interested only in Vietnam's independence, his supporters were violent communists, and therefore, had to be defeated at all costs.
