• AOCapitulator [they/them, she/her]
      ·
      edit-2
      3 years ago

      No, that was a month ago when Patrick Lancaster gave me the please like and subscribe and join the patreon youtuber spiel while in a bombed out ambulance fleeing a combat zone driving past corpses in the street

      • Frank [he/him, he/him]
        ·
        3 years ago

        Reminds me of stories from early in the US civil war where people were packing picnic lunches to go watch the battles from a nearby hill. I wonder if that was apocryphal, it sounds pretty deranged to write it out but people were hard up for entertainment back when the only books were The Bible and The Bible 2.

        • axont [she/her, comrade/them]
          ·
          edit-2
          3 years ago

          This did happen at the First Battle of Bull Run, which was the first major battle of the Civil War. Public belief was that the civil war was not much more than a kind of theatrical petty dispute over slavery happening yet again, because that's what the public was accustomed to. There had been a whole whole lot of powderkeg moments leading up to the civil war that didn't seem to start a huge war, like Bleeding Kansas, the caning of Sumner, the Boston riots.

          Everyday people had no reason to believe the declaration of the confederacy would be anything different. They thought this battle would be another in a long line of goofy displays where maybe a dozen people get killed, then everyone goes home and the issue of slavery is further kicked down the road.

          They had no idea it was actually gonna get serious and be a war lasting 5 years and killing 700,000 people. Those picnickers were largely well off Washington DC folk who saw the politics of the city as a grand spectacle. Then they watched a bunch of teenagers get obliterated by cannon fire, then went home as quickly as they could. Also death to America, of course.