Does this 4T seem a little 2T-ish to anyone else?

[galaxy]

(11-22-2021, 04:04 AM)pbrower2a Wrote:

(11-21-2021, 09:10 AM)David Horn Wrote: There has been Full-On Republican and Republican Lite for the past 40 years.  That doesn't change easily.  Yes, the more engaged can see through the fog, but the 90% who just live their lives don't really care.  To them, politics is an issue so far down their priority list, it only gets attention during big elections -- POTUS being the most common ones.  At the same time, they hold office holders responsible for everything from the weather to unfriendly neighbors.  There's no mandate for rationality.

It will take a hard hit in the gut to realign their thought processes.  Millennials have already had a punch or two, so they're already wary.  The older gens are too insolated and the come-to-Jesus moment still needs to happen for them.

Millennial adults are all old enough to remember two events -- the botched response to Hurricane Katrina and of course the economic meltdown of 2007-2009 which looks much like the first half of the economic meltdown of 1929-1932. If they can remember Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath they can also recall the speculative frenzy that initiated the meltdown of 2007-2009. Well-targeted use of the federal budget can solve another meltdown.

The Millennial Generation is unlikely to expect miracles from On High to solve their problems. Other generations may believe such out of faith (Boomers) or desperation (X). They have tried their formulas for supernatural miracles with no success.

A little perspective for you. I was born January 4, 2001, at probably the extreme late end of the Millennial generation. I don't remember Katrina itself, but I do remember people talking about it. All I could gather at my young age was that it was a hurricane, that it had hit Louisiana in the recent past, and that it was very bad.

I do remember the economic crisis, though I didn't understand it particularly well at the time. My understanding was:
Suddenly everyone was saying this word "economy" all the time, a word that I didn't understand, and every time I asked for an explanation I only got more confused. I eventually worked out that in practice, what all the big words meant was "something big happened somewhere far away but very important, and now suddenly no one has money and it's very bad." I think the moment I realized the seriousness of it for me personally was when my mother asked me to bring her her cell phone, a clunky late-2000s Windows Phone smartphone with a stylus, so that she could cancel the data plan on it to save money. There was another thing that I didn't understand at the time, but now shocks and horrifies me: there was a period of time during which my father would come home from work every day (he worked at a large casino) and tell my mom, looking more dead than alive as he did, how many people he had had to lay off that day.

I was in second grade during the 2008-2009 school year, and third grade during the 2009-2010 school year. I've only realized this recently, but I actually attended a private school at the time (for reasons that even my parents are still unsure about), and the reason there was such a dramatic difference between the size of my second-grade and third-grade classes was because a lot of people just couldn't afford it anymore. There were only 12 students in my third-grade class, compared to over 20 the year before.

My dad used to drive me to school every day then, and we'd always go down a long "suburban main drag"-type road on the way there (North Oak Trafficway in Gladstone, Missouri, for the curious), and I remember looking out the window and seeing "going out of business" signs everywhere, all over the many strip malls and old-houses-converted-into-businesses. For eight-year-old me, everything going out of business was quickly just part of the scenery, the new normal to me, though it definitely didn't fill me with a sense of optimism about my future, if the "default state" of businesses was to not last long and quickly fail. I imagine that drive would have been incredibly depressing if I had known what it meant.

At the same time, despite me not truly understanding it at the time, I'm just beginning to learn how much it actually did influence me. My parents (early X, born 1966 and 1968) have told me that they lost more than half of their entire life savings - financially ruined Nomads, just as S+H predicted. There was a clear mood change of the world and the people around me between 2007 and 2010 that I noticed even then, though it never stood out as unusual to me at the time with less than a decade of life. As far as I knew, that was just the way the world was. In 2007, while helping my parents clean the basement, I discovered a compilation of all of the Calvin and Hobbes comic strips, and loved them. As a very precocious six-year-old at the time myself, I saw a lot of myself in Calvin, and a lot of my own life and family in his. What wasn't so obvious to me at the time was how quintesentially 3T everything about Calvin and Hobbes is. I can read it now and be taken back very specifically to 2007 and what the world seemed like then, because it's both the first year I remember clearly in my life and the last year that was fully within the 3T.

Millennials definitely do not expect miracles. Especially those like me, the younger ones, who only remember a little bit of 3T before the Crisis Era began, and don't remember a time before 9/11, the event that sent the country into "maximum 3T" - we do not remember a time when the future ever seemed bright. I've talked about this in the "national mood" thread - 2015 seemed like a cheerful enough time to me, but to someone who experienced the 1950s and 1960s, it probably seems absolutely dismal, and everything in my life before or since that year has been even darker. This generation has never seen a miracle. The prevailing opinion among those near my age is that the only way these problems can ever be fixed is by a whole lot of work and dramatic change. There is a very high level of frustration with what is perceived as "the old sticks-in-the-mud standing in the way," the Boomers who refuse to give up their ideology and absolutism for any reason, even in the depths of crisis, when it is so clear to anyone actually paying attention that in this moment what is desperately needed is for people to leave their ideologies behind and do what needs to be done, regardless of what their "values" confabulations and theological (mis)interpretations have to say about it.