Americans especially don't have stories about making peace to fall back on, which is why no matter how many "Hitler Invades Poland" type scares they are sold, the propaganda continues to work. If you can't make a crazy appropriation of the Americanized WWII story, or the story of Stalin's gulags/"The Evils of CommunismTM", it might as well have never happened. That's why peace, coexistence, cooperation, as well as things like public health, just aren't in our vocabulary or minds.