What is the seminal event of your lifetime?

For me, I think it would have to be VietNam. Partly because I celebrated my 20th birthday in the A Shau Valley; but even more so because that was when I realized that the USA is not automatically on the side of the angels. Indeed, I discovered that my government was more than willing to lie, cheat, and steal when it suited their purposes.

Made me feel like crap.

Had been sleeping through it all until then.

I became a hard-core democrat and became more knowledgeable of all that's going on.

same here....politics bored me silly before then.

Have your father explain it to you.

Because I was 13.
Not Vietnam, becasue that wasn't "an event". It was backgroound noise until I started paying attention (like when the boys in my class started contemplating the draft.)

Geeezzz...what's it with bad events and b-days in my family?

As I said previously, they started bombing in Iraq on my 21st b-day!

"The Men Who Killed Kennedy" series on A&E. Apparently Corsican/French hitmen with drug and mafia ties, and CIA's loss of Cuba...moving ops to Thailand...moving moneylaundering more to Vegas...and later, to cover, with the Howard Hughes organization...it all came home to roost. The OAS had many exiled into Louisiana camps, see JFK movie and Houma being mentioned.

They started bombing Baghdad on my 21st B-day!

Damn repukes.

Made me realize the import of election 2000, and that the corporate killers DO NOT play softball.

I followed the proceedings on TV, and started to get the sense of how our system is at once noble and corrupt. And I was in my 20's, just starting to figure out my own place in this grand scheme as well.

I have to say what Bush/Cheney are doing is ending the United States as we know it. They must think it was so easy to grab ahold of the most powerful nation on earth and use it to enrich themselves and their buddies.

because the media certainly thinks that this event eclipses all others.

indeed the defining event for me.

:dunce:

wins my vote.

I was radicalized that night, watching the news reports of the police riot, seeing our own police beating on our own citizens. I was already politically aware, but this made me crazy and overnight I became politically active.

The election in 2000 had pretty much the same impact; it reawakened the political animal inside.

and more, but it was Anita Hill/Clarence Thomas "hearings" politicized me enough to make me an activist.

I just never thought that that could happen and that nothing would be done about it. :-(

I was not even in grade school yet but this one tragedy reached in from the wide, wide world and affected me. I think what registered the most is that Caroline is exactly my age and JFK was so eloquent and spoke so idealistically.

I was seven and my dad was in the Air Force. It was the event that brought home the realization that what happens a world away could affect me and that I was part of all this.

of course

My thinking and reaction to all other events that have since happened in America were shaped by the hundreds of thousands of people who came out that hot day in their Sunday best and held their heads up high to hear the dreams of the best civil rights speaker imaginable.

And just as that dream seemed to be getting started, the crushing nightmare when our speaker was assassinated by our own government not even five years later.

Seminal, of course, meaning "causing or marking the beginning of." As in "insemination."

While a person's life itself can have only one seminal event (the literal seminal event), various aspects of a person's life are often said to have "a" seminal event; one's career, one's art, one's relationship with another, one's beliefs.

Thus with a little more precision, this could be an interesting question, and one in which the words mean what they mean, and not just what you think they mean. For example "What was the seminal event in the evolution of your political beliefs?" The answer to that question, for me, would be the Vietnam war and the Nixon presidency.

On the rifle range shooting at man shaped targets.

Perfect time to realize this.
Before, the target was an actual man
( or a woman or child, for that matter.
After all. That Was 'Nam )

came to similar conclusion !

http://lexrex.com/enlightened/articles/warisaracket.htm

Also see the film The Plot to Overthrow FDR
www.ihffilm.com/r547.html
where this bona fide American HERO prevented a fascist coup d'etat by business interests including Bush's relatives Geo. Herbert Walker and Prescott Bush.

Hollywood needs to tell this guy's story, includes the Bonus Army of 1932 March on Washington DC.

I was nine. For the life of me I could not comprehend why this man was killed. When it was explained to me, it even made less sense.

Killed for trying to bring civil rights, dignity and self respect to those long denied it for no other reason than the color of their skin.

It changed how I saw everything.

and U2's Joshua Tree was hitting it big. ;)

The Cold War was the seminal event of my lifetime and, if I may humbly say, the key event of the last half of the 20th Century. It and it alone is responsible for all of the transformation - very little of it good - which has gone on in this Republic. In our zeal to combat a truly evil empire, we became much of what we combatted. In our distraction, the flaws inherent in our society and way of life became exacerbated, allowing the darker forces in our nature to gain supremacy.