Oh, if John Lennon had only penned this one! Just imagine, what if there had been no Vietnam engagement?
What if John Kennedy had not been assassinated and had been free to curtail or even dismantle the CIA?
What if the military-industrial complex President Eisenhower had warned of just a few years earlier had not been called into high gear for yet another round of (highly profitable) business? Would it have been brought under control and reduced greatly, with all of the investment directed elsewhere?
What if the Red-baiting bluff had been called and we’d instead seen Vietnam as a civil war rather than a Communist intrusion into the “free world”?
There would have been no lingering black cloud over America like the one that continues to fester. Even without the antiwar movement, I suspect, the nation would have been bitterly divided by the fiasco that ensued in Southeast Asia.
Would our economy have been unencumbered to grow the way Japan’s did at the time we were saddled with the costs of fighting or the accompanying steep inflation? Or the costs we’re continuing to pay in debt interest and veterans’ benefits?
And, oh yes, maybe there would have been no Hippie Trails novels, either.
Just imagine. And then add a comment on your vision. Music optional.
Jnana's Red Barn 
I’ll have to think about this. The ramifications are enormous.
Your posit of John Lennon’s unwritten question brought his son Julian Lennon to mind – a person who was certainly affected by his father’s sensibilities and the times, in a more profound manner than the rest of us, although his effect ran deep in the lives of many. I am reminded of his song “Valotte,” a dreamy, eerily evocative work which, upon hearing it, puts me in that “what if” state – what if things were different, what is real, after all?http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sNo7tZA0TxQ
Let peace prevail!