Quiet ... too quiet

[pbrower2a]

(09-23-2021, 06:04 AM)might have given America the equivalent of taramarie Wrote:

(09-23-2021, 05:58 AM)pbrower2a Wrote:

(09-23-2021, 04:36 AM)taramarie Wrote: And yes i agree, i am tired of the 4T. I long for my childhood when things felt better for me. But wish for something even better. I fear that things are turning for the worse and worry about what hellish 1st turning we will make happen. If my fears turn out correct, i pray the next idealists tear down the new civic order my foolish generation is creating right now.

If you think you are tired of this 4T, then think of how tired most Europeans and East Asians were of the last 4T -- if it did not kill them!. Consider that Ann Frank and Lauren Bacall were close contemporaries. One lived to a ripe old age and one didn't. There was a huge difference between being a Dutch Jew and an American Jew. I'm satisfied that Anne Frank would have had a very long and interesting life as an American Jew, as did her contemporary the great actress Lauren Bacall. 90% of Dutch Jews perished in the Holocaust. Such Dutch Jews as survived the Holocaust had to hide that they were Jewish successfully, which meant obliterating any ties to Judaism.

This 4T has ugly politics in America, and I am surprised that we haven't had anything like the Spanish Civil War or the Yugoslav break-up.  We have split into two hostile and exclusive camps as a nation, and whether America is a nation anymore is highly suspect. One side is extremely self-righteous despite little cause for believing in its righteousness, and the other is wholesomely rifted on ethnic and religious identity that it lacks the ability to do really-nasty things to people. I can say this: I would be more comfortable in an American Chinatown than I would in those superstition-laden parts of America in which people are proud to be white because they need something to be proud of and know little else to be proud of.

As the old Christmas Carol from the American Civil War goes (we have suddenly gotten some chilly weather in my part of America, so it is easier to think of Christmas carols goes),

Quote:Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

I heard the bells on Christmas Day
Their old, familiar carols play,
and wild and sweet
The words repeat
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!

And thought how, as the day had come,
The belfries of all Christendom
Had rolled along
The unbroken song
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!

Till ringing, singing on its way,
The world revolved from night to day,
A voice, a chime,
A chant sublime
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!

Then from each black, accursed mouth
The cannon thundered in the South,
And with the sound
The carols drowned
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!

It was as if an earthquake rent
The hearth-stones of a continent,
And made forlorn
The households born
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!

And in despair I bowed my head;
"There is no peace on earth," I said;
"For hate is strong,
And mocks the song
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!"

Then pealed the bells more loud and deep:
"God is not dead, nor doth He sleep;
The Wrong shall fail,
The Right prevail,
With peace on earth, good-will to men."

which says much (Longfellow) about the time, using the conventions of Christmas in contrast to the uncharitable attitudes of the Confederacy toward human kindness, especially in clinging to the rotten slave system that underpinned their reactionary, agrarian order. With a few modifications it could have applied to the Axis Powers, who had slave systems even more horrific than that of the Confederacy. The agrarian reactionaries of the antebellum South wanted "their" prime field hands to live long and productive lives, even if practically all that they produced went to the indulgence of the lawfully-recognized owners of those field hands.  

To be sure, the Germans could be as sentimental about Christmas as any people, and much that we consider an American about Christmas is really German (the Christmas tree is a late adoption from Germany in the English-speaking world and even the Nutcracker ballet is a treatment of a German story even if the music is composed by a Russian -- the music fits a German tradition. As for music: Handel's Messiah and J S Bach's Christmas Oratorio are by German composers). There was no Christmas spirit in any Nazi KZ-Lager, as the murders went on every day, including Christmas. 

The last 4T was far worse than this one, which is already going stale because we are deep into it.

I can imagine how the Other Side sees me as thoroughly horrible because I am for LGBT rights and recognize abortion as a necessity. (Hey you on the Right -- do you hate abortion? Then stop the boozing and whoring that gives women and girls, some as young as ten years old, pregnancies that they cannot handle!), do not see one possible manifestation of American identity, and recognize the Trump cult as bane instead of blessing.

I can already see one vision of the forthcoming 1T, and that assumes that "my" side wins. That is a multicultural America in which most communities recognize the validity of core traditions of their origins but also the need for Constitutional norms to keep people from going after each others' throats. "My" side recognizes that. I was raised by two antisemitic parents, and if one has any moral compass at all, then there is nothing easier against which to rebel than antisemitism. I came to recognize that the difference between the Jews that my parents hated and me was some semi-mythical character Whose Life Story was warped to fit the tastes of a still-pagan Greco-Roman world in order to convert that still-pagan Greco-Roman world.

This said,

Quote:The wrong shall fail,
The Right prevail.
With Peace on Earth, good will toward men

is the best that anyone can hope for. By the end of the last Crisis Era, Americans had come to recognize the Italian people as victims of Mussolini's fascism.

Here's how things went on April 30, 1945 (the day on which Satan Incarnate offed himself!) in the supposed "capital of the National Socialist Movement" -- Munich:







"The wrong shall fail, the Right prevail"... indeed. Two days earlier some of those troops had liberated Dachau, the concentration camp that had kept people of Munich cowed.

When the fear and loathing comes to an end, then so does the 4T... and the 1T begins. So it would be in Japan in four months.

The gangsters who ruled Germany, Italy, and Japan as leaders of the Axis Powers remain objects of hatred, and will remain so into the next Saeculum. The world must never forget the atrocities of the Axis Powers.

...Demographics are destiny in a country as polarized as America. The Hard Right depends upon demographics themselves doomed: it lacks the mass support of younger adults that it needs for winning free and fair elections and having the ability to dictate what goes on in Congress. The Hard Right is old, and it depends upon a population not replacing itself... and it has plenty of young defectors who desert to a spouse from an ethnic or religious group that has no stake in the Hard Right. The Hard Right has no intellectual appeal, and it is losing the smart people -- even those white, straight, and Christian. Donald Trump did well among ill-educated white people... but could not win any ethnic group or even the male gender (Trump is as blatant a male-chauvinist pig as there has ever been!) within that ethnic group. White men withe college degrees voted barely against Trump.

After Trump, what does the Hard Right have to offer? A great new world -- but only for economic elites. It is difficult to win people over with an appeal for the profit, power, and privilege of irresponsible people who expect the rest of the world to defer to the sybaritic excesses of that elite with offers of Pie in the Sky When You Die, But Only If You Comply and death -- swiftly by shooting or the gallows or slowly by starvation, followed by eternal damnation -- for those who fail to comply. The capitalist system has always had self-interest (which is not all bad) as its philosophical justification, and unlike feudalism it has expected the toilers to act in their best interest.

Trying to diminish what is happening in this 4T without asking first what the experience is so far from my perspective? Not surprised to be honest as that seems to happen a lot lately. The world is so fucking disconnected from each other that i am not surprised. If you are as clever as you claim you are, perhaps ask next time WHY this millennial feels completely burned out.

This 4T is really effective at burning people out. This 4T never fully extirpated the worst traits of the preceding 3T -- the corruption, the economic sadism, the splintering of communities, the vindictive hatred, and the promotion of superstition as wisdom.  That looks like what I see almost everywhere, except perhaps such places as Yugoslavia and Rwanda that have undergone the full horror of a 4T with its mass death.

About 700,000 people have died in the USA of COVID-19, a dangerous respiratory infection that has only one viable means of prevention with even medical treatment as inadequate. If people would quit believing right-wing ideologues and Fundamentalist clergy who tell people that Faith can defeat COVID-19, that the injection includes some tracker that allows the Government to follow anyone (really, your credit card, food aid, or debit card use or calls from a cell phone can do that extremely well). I just took three trips to northern Michigan (it is beautiful; I suggest that people visit Sleeping Bear Dunes and Tahquamenon Falls, and see the glorious Mackinac Bridge)... and I used a debit card (my credit cards are no longer usable as my credit went into the toilet as I lost practically everything after my parents died and I was economically drained while taking care of them), food aid to buy some microwaveable food and soft drinks along the way, and used a cell phone).  So why did the government not track me? Because I am not a criminal fugitive or in arrears on child support!

A chip in you? Sure -- we do that to dogs and cats in case they get separated from us and need to be returned. Maybe that would make it harder to get away with abusive behavior by a spouse. Fingerprints? I had to make those available when I worked for a bank.. .so I can never get away with a felony crime likely to leave fingerprints behind.

Some people take the last book of the Bible, Revelation, seriously. One of the fantastic stories is that wicked rulers will compel people to ear some Mark of the Beast that marks them as followers who are themselves safe from the wicked tyrant and can avoid starvation and death from thermal exposure. (My part of the world has "Russian winters" It's the Dfa climate zone that has summers like Miami and winters like Minsk. Minsk isn't part of Russia, but it used to be). It is the material of nightmares, and it is telling that Martin Luther didn't take it seriously because it did more to mar faith than to support it.

...I hope that I don't diminish anyone's experience. I cannot speak for the whole world, and that includes both New Zealand and Slovakia. I know what is going on in America, and much of it is ugly. I live in Michigan... where some extremists plotted to kidnap a Governor for pushing a reasonable, decisive response to COVID-19. Michigan got hit early and hard, well more specifically, Greater Detroit got hit early and hard...  and those extremists planned to take her across a state line to be "judged" for her "crimes". That is a lynching, and that might have given America a 2020-era equivalent of Bleeding Kansas just before our Civil War. We have people convinced (probably because they know nobody who thinks otherwise) that Trump really won because nobody could possibly vote otherwise unless a traitor. Such people see cities like Chicago and Detroit as modern-day equivalents of Sodom and Gomorrah... never mind that one can find much enrichment in life in the museums and have a good time watching a sporting event in either city.

OK, there are parts of Greater Detroit that really are Sodom and Gomorrah due to a large number of sexually-related businesses, rowdy bars, and liquor stores and with whores and drug-pushers plying their trade and drunks and addicts stumbling about. Cross the Detroit-Dearborn city line to the southwest and you have gone from the cesspool of southwestern Detroit and in more family-friendly Dearborn, which has a large Arab Muslim population. You are more likely to see a hijab than a prostitute's get-up. The political reality of a community with a large Islamic minority is that much that Islam considers depraved and intolerable is not done there. Then again, I don't want to have drunks and addicts bumping into me or wandering in front of my car; I have no use for a strip club or pornography palace;  if I am to get a drink I don't want to be in some place in which I can be hammered for a blank stare that looks like ogling some drunk's wife or girlfriend. I have Asperger's, so that is a risk that I take in the event that I should ever go into a rowdy bar. (Bars scare me, and for good reason).

Better that there be a mosque nearby than a whorehouse!

... We of course had people so convinced that Trump could not have lost because they don't know anyone who voted for Biden except for that 'weird' schoolteacher who teaches science instead of young-earth creationism and perhaps that swarthy couple or the Jew in town who owns and operates a CPA office or does medicine. Trump supporters (think of Classic X'er) think themselves the Real America and that anyone who disagrees is not a real American like himself. We have some very angry, cranky people in America... fortunately they are losing the demographic struggle to maintain political relevance. 

I know that I have limitations in my understanding of the world. I can travel a long distance, even within the state in which I live and still be in America. Slovakia? One of Vienna, Budapest, Krakow, or Lviv is close to you. The part of Canada closest to me isn't particularly interesting, thank you. You are probably closer to Berlin or Warsaw than I am to Toronto, which I understand, is quite interesting.