09-07-2022, 09:40 AM
(09-07-2022, 08:19 AM)sbarrera Wrote:(09-07-2022, 05:34 AM)JasonBlack Wrote: - pro-military intervention vs non-interventionist
- nationalistic vs critical of their country
Jason, you might be interested to learn about the anti-war movement among GIs in the 1930s. There's a great book about the movement called "When the Old Left Was Young" which I recommend.
https://www.google.com/search?q=when+the...+was+young
The pro-intervention/nationalist reputation came after Pearl Harbor, with the massive participation in the war. This suggests that a major crisis event could cause a shift in Millennials' attitude and reputation. Actually, the distance between the start of the last 4T and Pearl Harbor is the same as the distance between the start of this 4T and the COVID pandemic - 12 years. Perhaps there are ways in which the pandemic has changed Millennials?
On the whole, Millennial adults may have been in a far better state of mind than older adults in meeting the peril of COVID-19. The anti-vax crap was for X, Boomers, and the Silent. Millennial adults may have qualified last for inoculation, but once they were eligible they got it. I look at the loud-mouth deniers of the seriousness of COVID-19 and I do not see the Millennial generation. This generation trusts science more than it trusts any anti-rational rhetoric that threatens people with Hell if they fail to believe such nonsense as young-earth creationism or white supremacy.
Now that Generation X women are now almost completely out of child-bearing age, it is Millennial adults and their Homelander "little sisters" who are most vulnerable to extremist stances on abortion, those stances that hold that a fetus has some right to be carried full term even if dead or if death is a sure thing for the mother (and orphan status for her existing children). The extreme positions against abortion are really pro-death and anti-child.
It is hard to imagine the Millennial generation reverting to the idea that whatever happens in life is some Will of God. We have no shortage of examples of horrors from the Mongol horrors to the mistreatment of American First Peoples to the Atlantic slave trade to the Holocaust that if such things be the Will of God, then perhaps we would be better off without such a God. I would not worship a tyrant or gangster except under the prospect of such extreme distress as a red-hot poker directed at my rectum. I do not want either a Stalin or a mobster as an equivalent of a God, and I do not want my God to be a Stalin or a mobster.
As for Pearl Harbor -- Americans were in a Crisis mode, and the fascists mistakenly believed that America was a land of cultural and political chaos. The generational model suggests that a 4T is a time in which 3T values of mindless hedonism as a salve for extreme inequality fade while 1T values begin to entrench themselves.
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.