How has the U.S. gotten worse in your lifetime?
A lot more countries have nukes and some of them seem willing to use them.
I read Drummerboy's post and Steel's reply and I think hopefully,
Two steps forward and one step back.
LOST said:
I read Drummerboy's post and Steel's reply and I think hopefully,
Two steps forward and one step back.
They work together because opposites attract
annielou said:
Its all in your point of view. I'm sure there are many many groups of people who would rather be living now than say 50 years ago. If u r not in such a group you may tend to be more nostalgic about the past.
Yep. As depressing as the decline of progressive politics has been in the last 40 or so years, I certainly don't want to live in any other time. Every time I watch movies set in the 40s or 50s, I transport myself there imagining what my black female experience would be and it's always an unequivocal, "no thanks".
dave23 said:
But the Mexican food has gotten better.
This is a local perspective. I grew up where the Mexican food was good (in Texas) and I'm not sure it's any better there now. If anything, it has gotten more "chain" dominated although it's generally still pretty good. However, I can certainly agree that the Mexican food available in NJ is MUCH better now than it was 31 years ago when I moved here. Back then, it seemed to range from non-existent to pathetic.
sac said:
dave23 said:
But the Mexican food has gotten better.
This is a local perspective. I grew up where the Mexican food was good (in Texas) and I'm not sure it's any better there now. If anything, it has gotten more "chain" dominated although it's generally still pretty good. However, I can certainly agree that the Mexican food available in NJ is MUCH better now than it was 31 years ago when I moved here. Back then, it seemed to range from non-existent to pathetic.
No doubt. But the OP question was about the US as a whole, so my assertion remains. And we are far better for it.
My husband and I talk about this frequently. In the 60s and 70s, it seemed like the future was going to be better. Civil rights, environmental legislation, prevalence of vaccines, large middle class, growth of public-employee unions. A family could live a very comfortable life on one teacher's income. Businesses for the most part wanted to provide a service and make some money—they weren't focused on maximizing profit at all costs. Public companies did not exist for "shareholder value"—their primary purpose was to be in the business they were in, and if that business did well in the way that the management ran it, then the shareholders made money.
But the biggest change for me is the decline of our open society. In the 1960s through 1980s you never encounter any kind of security check unless you were going to an airport. Now we go through security at sports stadiums, museums, and concerts. We have to be buzzed to get in the front door of a public school. College dorms -- not only do you need to swipe your ID card to get in the front door, but you need to swipe to get into your hall. If you live on hall 2A, you can't can't through the door of 2B in the same building. AND you need to swipe to get into the hall bathroom! Also need to show ID to get into the library.
I was just watching old footage of the 1969 Mets World Series championship game. Remember how all the fans ran onto the field? It was pure, unadulterated joy. It can never happen again. (Fans on the field. Maybe Mets winning WS too.)
One more thing: Everything is over-produced. Especially music and musical performances.
back in the '40s, my family shared a party-line telephone if they were lucky and had money to pay the bill.
My family ran a mom and pop business in Brooklyn which had two phone booths. Folks in the apartment building above were called by pressing their buzzers and yelling "you got a call ". We also took messages! As I was the youngest, guess who played runner?
When a relative had cancer, it was not spoken aloud, but whispered in hushed tones. Often, the person was not even informed.
There was a time before SS and Medicare. Subways cost a nickel -- and you minded nickels and pennies.
There were food and clothing rationing, block air raid wardens, blackout curtains. Gold Stars in neighbors' windows.
If you were down and out and didn't have a relative to offer a couch, there was very little public assistance available.
And yet, I get nostalgic when I recall how Americans united back in the day.
mtierney said:
I get nostalgic when I recall how Americans united back in the day.
I get nostalgic when I recall how Americans united right after 9/11.
We can still do it with the proper motivation. Sadly, in recent years at least, it seems that the motivating events have been crises. These kinds of occasions show that our society is still capable of being better when we want to ... and we don't have to regress to 1950s policies and social structure to do that. But it WILL take more effective leadership as well as collective energy and goodwill to make it happen and I am not optimistic about that, especially recently.
aside from the aftermath of exceptional events like Pearl Harbor or 9/11, Americans were not more unified than they are today. It's a complete whitewashing of history to suggest otherwise. Let's just use one example. It's not easy traveling as an African-American today given racial profiling and other possibilities of unpleasant encounters. But at one time it was so difficult and unsafe, there needed to be a book published every year to advise would-be travelers:
HOW THE 'GREEN BOOK' SAVED BLACK LIVES ON THE ROAD
It's easy for straight, white Christians to remember an idealized past when everyone was unified. To an extent they were unified against anyone who wasn't like themselves.
We are ever closer to cultural.collapse, nuclear annihilation and species extinction.
krugle said:
GL2, would you be so kind and expand on what you're saying?
Back in those days, a lot of pro-feminist male academics – Michael Kimmel of SUNY, Jackson Katz (“Tough Guise”) and others published ideas positioning hyper-masculinity as a social construct; masculinity as something men “perform” and most fail at.
At the other end of the continuum, women’s rights groups fought to portray women as 3-dimensional humans as opposed to the Kardashian sexual creatures associated with “brands,” superficial glamor, etc.
It just saddens me. Obviously, mature men and women have made great gains. But lots of kids growing up with these images waste lots of time emulating them before they either grow up or remain intrigued with this crap.
I'm not going to agree to go completely with what is worse in the U.S. Certainly there is imho one major area that is the root of all that db listed in the OP. And that is the multitude of factors that are combining to cause extreme income and wealth inequality. Some of it is the result of efforts by rich and powerful interests to game the system to enrich themselves. Some of it is technology. Part of it is political posturing that diverts attention from real economic issues toward scapegoats.
That's the one big overriding issue where the U.S. is worse off that 40 years ago. Take any of the other issues, it goes back to rich and powerful entities trying to suck money upward from the 99.9% to the 0.1%. I don't feel this is not solvable however. Eventually, people will likely begin to recognize that doing the same things over and over are not sharing the wealth. The one thing that can get even the most die-hard believers to abandon the supply-side thinking that got us here is economic self-interest. Eventually the majority of people, even in the reddest of states, may come around to realizing that organizing results in more wealth for everyone, instead of survival of the fittest. We've already seen it with the ACA. The entire conversation has been changed on health insurance. There are still a few dead-enders who don't believe everyone is entitled to health insurance. But the "repeal and replace" debacle made it clear we had a paradigm shift on health care. The future isn't going to be repeal of ACA, it's going to be about making health care more affordable for everyone.
With regard to most every social issue, the citizens of this country are making progress. We still have racism and bigotry and sexism. But we're trying to change. By most measures we are safer -- there's far less crime, less drug use, fewer accidents, less teen pregnancy than there was 40 years ago.
I look at a lot of survey research among young adults and young families with kids. Despite what we see among angry older white men, our country is more accepting of differences. A lot of what we're seeing in Trumpism is the furious fight of a dying segment of our country. In one more generation, the worst of our xenophobia and irrational hatred toward others will be dead. It won't be gone, and we'll still have work to do. But the most violent, hateful aspects will be like the Boston demonstration last weekend -- a hundred fascists among a crowd of 40,000 opponents.
I don't think it's hopeless. I do think that the Baby Boomer generation has done everything it could to turn the U.S. into a third world hellhole with its pursuit of unbridled wealth. But fortunately our generation's hypocrisy may turn out to be its saving grace. Because for all our actions in pursuit of wealth and possessions, we talked a better game regarding acceptance, tolerance and equality. And the current generation of young adults and kids seems to have listened to the words and ignored at least some of the actions.
The "wrap" has ushered in its own dark age in terms of faux Mexican food. If a burrito is green it should go in the garbage (unless it is covered in tomatillo sauce).
mtierney said:
And yet, I get nostalgic when I recall how Americans united back in the day.
They united to toss Japanese Americans into concentration camps. Unity can be a mixed blessing.
America has never been united enough to avoid social segregation and no one is immune. A 2013 survey suggests that up to 75% of white Americans do not have a single person of color in their regular social circle. I've noticed it in SOMA as well. I miss ungentrified neighborhoods where people of all races and ethnicities just naturally grew up together and still remain friends. I doubt we'll see that again in our lifetimes.
ml1 said:
aside from the aftermath of exceptional events like Pearl Harbor or 9/11, Americans were not more unified than they are today. It's a complete whitewashing of history to suggest otherwise. Let's just use one example. It's not easy traveling as an African-American today given racial profiling and other possibilities of unpleasant encounters. But at one time it was so difficult and unsafe, there needed to be a book published every year to advise would-be travelers:
HOW THE 'GREEN BOOK' SAVED BLACK LIVES ON THE ROAD
It's easy for straight, white Christians to remember an idealized past when everyone was unified. To an extent they were unified against anyone who wasn't like themselves.
This. Nostalgia for the "good old days" doesn't account for what it was like to be black or brown in this country during those times.
Great thread DB! A lot to read and think about.
IMO, income equality/inequality determines quality of life and that in turn determines whether we "feel" things are better or worse than they once were. As income inequality has gotten worse the day to day quality of life we experience gets worse. This is happening on a micro and macro level.
I agree with the OP's original premise. It's reasonable to look at the size of the prison population, the number of people with drug and other debilitating problems, the amount of infrastructure that is crumbling, and ask, how did a developed country get here, and how do we get out of it. I certainly don't know. Some people suggest that we should concede that the federal government really is just going to be a huge security and defense agency, with some safety-net programs, and if we want to see progress on other issues, it has to be at state and local levels, and/or through private philanthropy and public/private partnerships.
I would quibble with a few of the remarks. Of course, not all of the middle class is suffering. And not all college students are coming out with crippling debt - actually many students aren't - though costs are excessive.
Part of it might be that the original expectations regarding the "American dream" were unreasonable and not sustainable. The idea is that a high school grad in the 1940s will have kids and a two-bedroom house, his/her children will go to City College and have a three-bedroom house in a better neighborhood, and their kids will go to Harvard and have mansions, etc., etc. That's not sustainable, someone is going to hit a wall somewhere, particularly given that the population has basically doubled since the 1940s/50s.
I'm also not willing to discount progress. At the beginning of the 20th century, the average life expectancy of an American was 47. Today it's 30 years beyond that. People are surviving diseases and conditions that might have been fatal just 30 or 40 years ago. That shouldn't be dismissed as being trivial. Much of that progress has come from the work of public health, medical and scientific professionals trained in the U.S., benefitting from some federal investments (NIH, etc). Perhaps some of that work - many scientists say that better understanding the brain will be the biggest scientific development of this century - will help us better prevent and treat addictions and debilitating illness. If someone wants to help cure cancer or work at the highest levels in neuroscience or specific areas of engineering and tech, the U.S. generally is the place to be.
I'm not optimistic about political solutions in the near term. The Dems might regain the White House in 2020, but not much else. And it's not clear how progressive or effective that person will be. And there's no particular reason the Reps won't get it back in 2024 or '28. In addition to what others are saying here, seems that one ray of hope is that the demographics shift in a way that benefits progressives running for office, and staying in for multiple terms - but that can be decades away.
I haven't said anything approaching a nostalgia for the past.
annielou said:
Its all in your point of view. I'm sure there are many many groups of people who would rather be living now than say 50 years ago. If u r not in such a group you may tend to be more nostalgic about the past.
good post. I agree that the central theme of our failure is economic - tied to Reaganomics/Supply Side b.s.. And just a general shift to the right by almost every politician on economic issues. "privatization", no more anti-trust enforcement, the growth of the financial griftiverse industry, tax cut fever.
And yeah - us baby boomers are the worst cohort in ages. We're just terrible.
ml1 said:
I'm not going to agree to go completely with what is worse in the U.S. Certainly there is imho one major area that is the root of all that db listed in the OP. And that is the multitude of factors that are combining to cause extreme income and wealth inequality. Some of it is the result of efforts by rich and powerful interests to game the system to enrich themselves. Some of it is technology. Part of it is political posturing that diverts attention from real economic issues toward scapegoats.
That's the one big overriding issue where the U.S. is worse off that 40 years ago. Take any of the other issues, it goes back to rich and powerful entities trying to suck money upward from the 99.9% to the 0.1%. I don't feel this is not solvable however. Eventually, people will likely begin to recognize that doing the same things over and over are not sharing the wealth. The one thing that can get even the most die-hard believers to abandon the supply-side thinking that got us here is economic self-interest. Eventually the majority of people, even in the reddest of states, may come around to realizing that organizing results in more wealth for everyone, instead of survival of the fittest. We've already seen it with the ACA. The entire conversation has been changed on health insurance. There are still a few dead-enders who don't believe everyone is entitled to health insurance. But the "repeal and replace" debacle made it clear we had a paradigm shift on health care. The future isn't going to be repeal of ACA, it's going to be about making health care more affordable for everyone.
With regard to most every social issue, the citizens of this country are making progress. We still have racism and bigotry and sexism. But we're trying to change. By most measures we are safer -- there's far less crime, less drug use, fewer accidents, less teen pregnancy than there was 40 years ago.
I look at a lot of survey research among young adults and young families with kids. Despite what we see among angry older white men, our country is more accepting of differences. A lot of what we're seeing in Trumpism is the furious fight of a dying segment of our country. In one more generation, the worst of our xenophobia and irrational hatred toward others will be dead. It won't be gone, and we'll still have work to do. But the most violent, hateful aspects will be like the Boston demonstration last weekend -- a hundred fascists among a crowd of 40,000 opponents.
I don't think it's hopeless. I do think that the Baby Boomer generation has done everything it could to turn the U.S. into a third world hellhole with its pursuit of unbridled wealth. But fortunately our generation's hypocrisy may turn out to be its saving grace. Because for all our actions in pursuit of wealth and possessions, we talked a better game regarding acceptance, tolerance and equality. And the current generation of young adults and kids seems to have listened to the words and ignored at least some of the actions.
You kind of asked a question and then answered it with a nod toward a better past in comparison to a scary present. In any case my nostalgia comment was general and not directed to you personally.
drummerboy said:
I haven't said anything approaching a nostalgia for the past.
annielou said:
Its all in your point of view. I'm sure there are many many groups of people who would rather be living now than say 50 years ago. If u r not in such a group you may tend to be more nostalgic about the past.
Fair enough. I'm a bit sensitive on the topic because one thing I dislike a lot is when people get into a "good old days" mode, especially when it comes to kids and younger generations. I am not a "good old days" kind of guy.
I don't think, for example, that our education system is any worse than it was when I grew up. I don't think kids are being destroyed by social media and cell phones. These are the same complaints of every generation since about Aristotle (I betcha a lot of people bemoaned the end of the oral culture when they invented papyrus.) and they never amount to anything. It's just the sounds of a bunch of grumpy olds.
I DO think, however, that as a whole there is a larger segment of the population that is hugely ignorant about how our government works and about social policy in general. These can largely be grouped together as the Trump Rally audience. And this state is a direct effect of the right-wing media complex - which again, was enabled by a general move away from liberalism towards "free market" b.s. A lot of Dems have blood on their hands regarding this.
annielou said:
You kind of asked a question and then answered it with a nod toward a better past in comparison to a scary present. In any case my nostalgia comment was general and not directed to you personally.
drummerboy said:
I haven't said anything approaching a nostalgia for the past.
annielou said:
Its all in your point of view. I'm sure there are many many groups of people who would rather be living now than say 50 years ago. If u r not in such a group you may tend to be more nostalgic about the past.
I'll expand on my OP a bit...
The idea of "social progress", or maybe just "progress" can be divided a number of ways. One way is to separate government policy from market effects, and then further divide those two.
Government policy is primarily military, economic, regulatory (the EPA, FDA, FCC) and social (civil rights, LGBTQ rights, disability rights, gender rights, etc) and there's a lot of overlap between the three. In Government policy there has been enormous progress in the regulatory and social areas. For those of you alive in the 60's - just think of the smog we had to deal with and the filthy beaches and rivers. And almost every "out" group has seen significant improvement, in both direct government policy and in the personal social attitudes that are part of civil rights issues.
But economic policy has sucked big time. The ACA was actually one of the biggest areas of progress in the last 40 years - which is a bit sad if you think about it. The rest of economic policy has been a disaster, on the whole. Occasionally they'll pass a tax increase that effects the wealthy, but it just gets wiped out when the next set of R's take over.
Market effects are largely about the improvement or invention of material goods or services which make our lives better/easier. With the coming of age of the computer industry, the last 40 years has been a revolution, mostly for the better. I could go on and on so I won't. It hasn't all been sh!ts and giggles, but the good has overwhelmed the bad, I think.
And somewhere in the whole mix is the military, to which I have to say not a damn bit of good has been brought about by the many many trillions of dollars spent in the last 40 years and beyond. Sure, you can point to something useful maybe here and there, but c'mon.
My point with this ramble is to just say that yes, the last 40 years hasn't been a total disaster, and (I think) for most of the people who post in these threads, it's been a helluva lot better than most people.
I mean, go over my main bullet points in the OP. Most of these are hardly big problems for the majority of people in West Essex County (except for maybe student debt). They certainly aren't big problems in my own personal day-to-day life.
That's because we're privileged and lucky. But huge, huge swaths of the country are neither.
You know, the draft may suck, but maintaining a war-making force through voluntary means by making the economic prospects of young people dicier than before, or by overreacting militarily to terrorism is no good either.
We've so normalized the military that we just accept it in all it's deplorableness. But it is deplorable.
Klinker said:
steel said:
Also, although it sucks that we still have an Afghanistan, at least there’s no more Vietnam draft.
A fair argument could be made that we still have an Afghanistan because there is no more draft.
Carter referred to a malaise in the country and I believe it is worse since he spoke the phrase. There is despair. When I drove to Wyoming last week, I saw a shopping mall that were down to three stores. A small town that had maybe 12 commercial buildings and only one was open as an insurance brokerage.
Granville, New York.... I go there maybe three or four times each year. The town center has 22 storefronts and only three are open. Micky D's on the border of the town is thriving.
I am o.k. My kids are likely o.k. But I worry about my grandkids and their opportunities and future.
Carter never used the word "malaise".
Formerlyjerseyjack said:
Carter referred to a malaise in the country and I believe it is worse since he spoke the phrase. There is despair. When I drove to Wyoming last week, I saw a shopping mall that were down to three stores. A small town that had maybe 12 commercial buildings and only one was open as an insurance brokerage.
Granville, New York.... I go there maybe three or four times each year. The town center has 22 storefronts and only three are open. Micky D's on the border of the town is thriving.
I am o.k. My kids are likely o.k. But I worry about my grandkids and their opportunities and future.
drummerboy said:
Carter never used the word "malaise".
Formerlyjerseyjack said:
Carter referred to a malaise in the country and I believe it is worse since he spoke the phrase. There is despair. When I drove to Wyoming last week, I saw a shopping mall that were down to three stores. A small town that had maybe 12 commercial buildings and only one was open as an insurance brokerage.
Granville, New York.... I go there maybe three or four times each year. The town center has 22 storefronts and only three are open. Micky D's on the border of the town is thriving.
I am o.k. My kids are likely o.k. But I worry about my grandkids and their opportunities and future.
I stand corrected. The google refers to his malaise speech so I ran with it.
A fair argument could be made that we still have an Afghanistan because there is no more draft.