Ignorance is bliss

I feel after watching the movies in class and reading and watching the materials outside of class that ignorance on both the part of the government and the people where to blame for most of the confusion came from. When the U.S. government was building the atomic bomb they really didn’t know what was going to happen. Some sientists said that is would disrtoy the earth. Others said that it would vaporize the atmosphere. Otheres still contned that nothing bad would happen and their would be know lasting effects efter words. You can see this when they told people that white houses could withstand the effects of the bomb. OR when they where selling fallout shelters that we now know would never know. Even wonce they had built the bomb and tested it, they didn’t know the full extent of the long term damage. So when you look at the films in class you could say that the government was trying to explain something to the public that they didn’t fully grasp themselves. Looking at this time and places coming out of the great dipression and WWII the U.s. people were used to looking to their government for help and all the answer. The fact is our government haddent had large corruption charges yet so there was no reason not to beilve them. Looking back on it all we can see the government proably did know more then they where telling the American people. But the fact is that you really cant tell people the real truth or their would have been a mass panic. So buy keeping people somewhat in the dark they could go on whith their lives and keep the country moving. The fact is ignorance is bliss; the less you know the less you fear. And during this era people already had enough to fear. Finally while I was watching the films in class I kept asking myself could peoele really belive these films. When we look back on this films today they seem so simple, with bad acting. The filmming to our eyes is preeety bad. But if you think about it film at this point in time is fairly young and filming and dialogue writing technices have not yet been fully achevied. But to a viewer from the same era its perfectly conceivable that these film would be beliveable. People where still getting used to the TV medium as a whole and had no idea at this time that TV can be used to manipulate a population to belive what ever concept is shown to them the most. Like was stated in class it was almost fashionable at a certain point to be nuclear ready. The concepts where shown to people all the time. On TV, radio, befor moves, bilboards. With these ideas everywhere its was igrained into everyone mind.