11-01-2020, 08:26 PM
(11-01-2020, 06:10 AM)pbrower2a Wrote:(10-31-2020, 08:02 PM)User3451 Wrote: The debate over things like lgbt rights has been settled
A return to conformity in the next high is outside of the context of the culture wars. The culture wars will be done in the next high. That's the point. They're already done now, just a lot of people playing catch-up.
I would have never guessed that the gray champions would be Trump, Biden, hillary and bernie. Nonetheless, we will move through this crisis and discard neoliberalism and the reactionary right.
I expect a recalibrated economy, progress on climate, new infrastructure, and a repudiation of extremism like radical islam, Trumpian, wokism and the like
Basically, what society as a whole deems settled remains settled.
We are two days from the 2020 election, and that will determine much. It is a choice between old decencies and more primitive standards of irresponsible power of those in position to determine who gets the opportunities for the hereditary Good Life and who become hereditary peons. (Inheritance is a shady way of determining wealth and poverty, but at least it isn't everything). A rigid class system, an economic Apartheid so to speak, makes even personal enterprise impossible or irrelevant.
We are going to see standards emerge to determine what is acceptable and what is not in public life. We all know what we would like to see fade out: in my case, the celebrity circus, the denial of reason, the "stick-it-to-the-loser" ethos, and shock-jock rhetoric. I'd like to see politics become a means of service and not simply a means of dividing the tax revenues among "winners". I want to see a personality cult of any kind become unthinkable. I want people to accept reason, with a dollop of human kindness and conscience, as the arbiter of public choices. I want quality to matter more than identity in political life.
We are headed to a First Turning. I see COVID-19 as the core of this Crisis. It certainly kills like a Crisis war even if the distribution of death is not so much "young men who never got a real start in adult life" as one would have expected in a shooting war. (It may be more likely to kill veterans of the Korean Conflict or the Vietnam War, veterans of which are now elderly). We have an enemy, a virus, as loathsome as any enemy that America has ever had, except perhaps Hitler. It is killing Americans at a faster clip than World War II or the Civil War.
The difference between this Crisis Era and the previous three is of course the quality of leadership. American leadership in the Continental Congress was collective but on the whole competent. Abraham Lincoln and FDR are about as stellar wartime leaders as one could have. Donald Trump may not be as horrible as the Axis leadership of WWII, but he has failed badly. He appeases an enemy that has already invaded. Someone who does that in a shooting war is a defeatist traitor who can rightly expect to die by firing squad or noose if the country that he betrayed should end up winning the war. Who knows? This President might yet die of complications of COVID-19, the worst enemy of America since America faced the Third Reich and Thug Japan. It is up to you to decide whether such a cosmic fate is right.
Darwinian natural selection has a way of excising fools. Surely you know of the Darwin Awards by now, but those encompass people who do something spectacularly, inexcusably, and creatively stupid. Smoking a cigarette after having gargled with gasoline, attaching a rocket to a car and then igniting the rocket, or challenging someone to stab a bullet-proof vest are spectacular ways to die. There are plenty of stupid ways to die, like pulling a gun on a cop, drunk driving, swimming in unsafe waters, breaking into a dog-infested house (dogs are built like bears and Big Cats), failing to heed warning signs about cliffs and waterfalls, speeding, mixing pills and liquor, eating the wrong mushrooms, having a faulty heater, using a hibachi inside a house, or contracting COVID-19. Nature has a way of culling losers or at least ensuring that they be unattractive people in the reproductive game. Some of these means are tragic and may involve people who did nothing wrong (let us say victims of the sinking of the Titanic).
Dying of COVID-19 is pointless. People who followed Donald Trump in his statements that "like a miracle it will go away" may not deserve to die, but they may die nonetheless. Most importantly, people will live into the 1T with habits that the 4T established as necessary for avoiding the Worst.
Ask me in a couple days how I expect America to change. First comes the 2020 election. The wait agonizes many of us.
I just don't think this election is a referendum on the direction of the 1T
Biden is not a grand new day, he's a 3T throwback.
The next 4 years will still be core 4T