Although I am not old enough to remember the Hostage crisis, but it sounds like it should have woken up the whole world.
The Hostage Crisis did indeed inform us that we were living in a brave new world, but without all the blood that has been spilled since then we didn't have the proper context in which to place it.
We didn't know jack about Islam at that time. We thought the Shi'ites were the bad muslims and the Sunni were our friends, after it was over. Then we find out that the Sunni's are just as bad as the Shi'ites. Or some of them are... and some of them aren't. Even then we didn't know what Wahabbism was. It's been a 25 year (at least) learning process for the American public.
Obviously your old enough to remember 9/11 and look how many are going back to sleep so soon after that Muslim led disaster.
Problem is our govt and MSM keep chalking these off as isolated incidents.
I was standing in front of the Iranian embassy with a tape machine and a microphone...and OUR students yelling "Down with Khomeni!" Holy smokes, that was another day. I remember doing a phone interview with the Iranian dep. chief of mission of the embassy after the hostages were taken, and this guy had nowhere to go. If he went home, he would be killed or at least imprisoned, yet he could not stay on with the embassy because the mullahs had taken control of the government.
Do you recollect who the president was when all of this happened? The whining wreck from Plains, GA, "Mr. Tower of Jello," Jimmah Carter.
It was a dreary, depressing period, one of the lowest in the nation's history, and certainly the worst in my lifetime. Jimmy Carter was certainly right about the "national malaise," but wrong to blame it on the people, instead of the incompetence and pusillanimity of our government and other elite institutions.
Everything seemed to have been going wrong for the previous ten or twelve years, especially the humiliating pullout from Vietnam. The 60's and 70's saw the loss of many small nations to Communism, and the prospect of losing many more to a Soviet Union that seemed twelve feet tall in those days.
There had been the Arab oil embargo in 1974, another oil crisis in 1979, gas rationing, price controls, wage controls, inflation, unemployment, recession, riots by hippies/yippies/urban blacks, strikes, Watergate and other political scandals, and every other kind of social disorder you can name. Crime skyrocketed. Charles Manson and his gang, the Son of Sam, and the Symbionese Liberation Army brought a new kind of terror to our streets and homes, of which the Unabomber was only an echo. Religion faltered, as mainline Protestant denominations and Catholic liberation theologists focused on their own lame conceptions of social justice, and ignored the well-being of their congregations' immortal souls.
The schools were no help; the Marxist educational establishment spent as much time stoking fears of nuclear annihilation as teaching the three R's. Be thankful that kids today only have to deal with global warming hysteria and classes in how to put condoms on bananas. Imagine that kind of leftist indoctrination, multiplied by four or five, for an idea of how it was for a school kid back then.
The music of the 70's mostly sucked compared to the 50's and 60's, especially at the end of the 70's when disco came along. The automobile industry set records for shoddy design and workmanship that will never again be equaled. The dollar's value crumpled, and gold tripled in price. High interest rates meant would-be home buyers were locked into renting. Farms and businesses failed by the millions. Everything pointed to a continued downward spiral of failure and stagnation.
Jimmy Carter embodied the cramped, cranky, dour, pessimistic mood of the time. As he hectored us to turn down our thermostats and wear sweaters all the time indoors, as we festered in our malaise, everyone understood his subtext: Lower your expectations of the American Dream, and accept that the nation's zenith already lay behind us. Oh, it was an awful time. I feel like my memories of those days should be in Depression-era black-and-white.
To cap the worst decade of my life, the howling Mahometan hordes took over Iran, and invaded our embassy. Dozens of our fellow citizens were held hostage for more than a year, while Carter dithered and dallied. He finally approved a pitifully inadequate helicopter-borne rescue attempt that ended in even more failure and ignominy than anything that came before.
The election of Reagan, along with the ascension of Maggie Thatcher and Pope John Paul II, were like a beam of sunlight the morning after a ferocious storm. I will forever be proud that I cast my first-ever vote for Ronald Reagan. The Iranians recognized that they were dealing with an entirely different sort of man, and released our hostages the day he was inaugurated. Since 1980, there have been some stumbles along the way, but the general course has been ever more onwards and upwards.
My mind has been made up about the Muslim world since the hostage crisis. From then on, I never expected anything better from the murderous Ishmaelite filth, and nothing since then has shown this opinion to be wrong. In every question of international relations, I have known for almost thirty years that there is no point in treating the Muslim world as anything more than a particularly vicious and poisonous snake. Some of my countrymen didn't learn this lesson until September 11, and it looks like Europe is now in the midst of the same eye-opening experience. May this enlightenment continue to grow and mature, as we prepare once and for all for the final clash of civilizations.
-ccm