The 3 C's

It's a bit of a pun, my old alma mater has, in the last decade, decided that it wanted to focus on teaching their students Competence, Compassion and Conscience. Yes, it's Jesuit.
[Whenever I blog, I feel like I write chiefly about my little realizations in life, only to wonder, was I the last to figure this out? Did everyone get it and oh wow none of this is news to anyone?]
Some years ago, CNN made a stunning documentary series called "The Cold War". I caught it completely by accident while doing field work and being stuck in motel rooms with cable. I only caught a handful of episodes, but since then (ie the last ten years) I have been searching listings and video collections for the set. I would bid on them on eBay only to watch the nidding reach $400 and go to some person with a handle of "histprof." Well, I found out that the Lilly Library at Duke owns the set, and for the last month, Mike and I have been getting one 3-hour video each weekend (there are 8 total). "Doing our homework" we call it.
Watching these videos inevitably brings back memories of my father, for whom the world was drawn in black-and-white lines. It also brings to light how intricately the Cold War was tied to Colonialism and to Civil Rights. 3 C's.
My father was an inveterate died-in-the-wool colonial. He believed that colonialism was right and good, that it was a matter of superior people administering inferior ones, and reaping their resources was just payment for such. Here in the crescendo movements of the Cold War, nations under the yoke of one or another power are being "liberated" coincidentally with the end of the war. Very quickly, alliances with liberators draw up a new power map. From this power comes fear. In the midst of all this "liberating", people are actually calling for freedom and justice. In the face of governments so ruthlessly certain they are free and just, these people are called enemies. Communists. My father very much fell into this black-and-white world. In the 90s when everything became grey area after the Berlin Wall came down, I could sense things stopped making sense. He looked for enemies, but they didn't have the aura of evil anymore. How strange it must have felt to him.
Because I still don't really understand what made my father tick, I often look to outside sources for clues. Was he an anachronism or was he really strange? Last night I had a thought: every single chapter of history I had an ancestor who lived at that time, though probably not in that exact place. We all do. No history teacher ever told me this. See about these incredible realizations that take me so long to reach?