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

[pbrower2a]

(11-23-2021, 12:13 AM)galaxy Wrote:

(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.

Children between the ages of 5 and 10 are far more perceptive than adults often give them credit for. They get the signals when magazines quit appearing in the mail, when blocks of cable channels are no longer available, when the family vacations are to duller and less-expensive places or involve staying with relatives instead of in motels, families eat out less, when Mommy spends less time getting new clothes, when Daddy quits talking about his golf game (he has cancelled his membership), and there are fewer presents around the Christmas tree. 

Perhaps most obviously, children often hear of the direness of the economic order from parents that their parents would never express on the job. In many jobs (especially those with public contract, which have heavily supplanted industrial work), people are obliged to show unbounded optimism and confidence in all things related to the working environment even if they find their personal lives a mess due to bad bosses, work-life balances that sacrifice personal life tor corporate profit and image, and of course poverty. People who would be scared to gripe on the job to bosses, clients, customers, or co-workers aren't so scared to gripe about such things in the presence of their kids. Economic realities weren't all that great in the first half or middle of the Double-Zero decade, and when "the economy" went into the septic tank, Millennials were the children from about toddler age. That has greatly shaped the political orientation of Millennial adults.

In politics, the showiest part is the Presidency. That Obama is the most competent and least troubled of Presidents that anyone under 40 can remember is good for Obama-like liberal ideals on economics and arch-conservatism on rule of law, law and order, foreign policy, respect for expertise, adherence to protocol and precedent, the validity of tradition (the Obama innovation on that is recognition of traditions different from his) and rejection of populist demagoguery.  Sane conservatives have always recognized that if they are to have any appeal, then they must allow the common man to have a stake in the system. Fear goes only so far in winning acquiescence in hurtful behavior by economic, political, and bureaucratic elites. 

We obviously can't go back to the 1950's; there's much that we would not now accept:

Jim Crow practice
polio
male chauvinism
prohibition of interracial marriage
heavy use of tobacco
relegation of nearly all minorities into second-class citizenship
marginalization of the handicapped
the Red Scare
leaded gasoline and paint
"Blood-Alley" intercity roads
cars that were deathtraps in collisions
the insipid music of hollow crooners and boring arrangers
outlawry and vilification of homosexuality

Maybe there will be parallels, but I can see some 2T, 3T, and even 4T innovations and practices being enshrined as reality. Some of the big "no's" that we have generally established (against drunk driving, meth, child sexual abuse, gay-bashing, disenfranchisement of minorities) will stick. Women will not be consigned again entirely to domestic servitude. Tobacco will not make a comeback. Model minorities will be a big part of public life. Gutter racism will be very much on the margin. People will complete more years of schooling (they will need to just so that they have the capacity to cope with the technology of entertainment and knowledge).  Of course most of the pop culture and many academic fads will go onto the trash heap of history. Speculative booms will be recognized as the destructive frauds that they are. We are going to recognize poverty as a form of child abuse even if we treat skid-row bums as pariahs.

This, I hope, is not a wish list. There is much that I would like to see that will not come to pass. We are not a truly rich country if we must impose mass poverty to ensure that a few people get to live in opulent splendor. We will not remain free if a majority of us follows religious fanatics and Trump-like demagogues. (Demagogues make conflicting promises, so once in power they choose which people they will betray. Should I die soon (I'm not saying that that will happen) I hope that we Americans have learned something essential from the putrid example of Donald Trump. We are not exempt from Christian versions of Ruhollah Khomeini or from mirror-image Marxists.

There is no magic in being American that exempts us from the consequences of mass stupidity.