07-01-2019, 04:33 AM
(06-30-2019, 06:14 PM)Warren Dew Wrote:(06-28-2019, 06:51 AM)sbarrera Wrote: Warren, how far back to you go in these forums? The name "Homeland generation" was coined on the old Fourth Turning forum; there is actually some debate about exactly who chose the term and when. The name was then adopted by Neil Howe (he uses it on his Lifecourse site and in his Forbes articles).
But if you think it's a stupid name, that is certainly your right. But I do find it compelling that the use of the term "Homeland" coincides with the pressing issue of child refugees on the southern border.
I was not on the Fourth Turning forums.
"Homeland generation" was adopted when people thought 9/11 marked the beginning of the crisis. If it had - if the "war on terror" had proven to be as serious as WWII - then it would have been appropriate. 9/11 turned out to be a false alarm, though.
Child refugees don't mark the beginning of the crisis either.
My first thoughts on 9/11 were "Pearl Harbor". Even so, the Pearl Harbor attack had happened as America had largely resolved the domestic crisis (the Great Depression), but the international crisis (America could no longer ignore the evil designs of Hitler and Tojo) was far from resolution.
Soon after the Pearl Harbor attack the United States government had practically shut down the consumer economy that was just beginning to pick up and transform the United States into a fearsome military machine. Americans may have wanted peace, but if they didn't get peace they would settle for victory. In two and a half years the United States would stab the Demonic Reich in the back -- on D-Day. In four years Hitler and Mussolini would be in Hell and Tojo would be in custody.
9/11 was still a Third Turning event. The President told us to go shopping and to travel. He fostered a real-estate bubble. That's not what FDR did. Any civilian spending beyond the bare minimum would be to facilitate military production. Private investment would be welcome -- so long as it produced weapons for the Arsenal of Democracy. Elite indulgence? A real-estate hustle? Forget it!
On 9/11, the Pearl Harbor attack was only sixty years in the past. Sixty years after a Crisis event is usually still only a Third Turning, even if the Degeneracy that leads to a Fourth Turning. The Double-Zero Decade was quite degenerate, to put it tamely.
Crisis Eras often begin with financial panics -- the Panic of 1857 that darkened the American mood, the Great Stock Market Crash of 1929, and an economic meltdown that by the autumn of 2008 suggested a replay of the Crash of 1929. Stay tuned. Donald Trump is a Crisis in himself.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.
