01-08-2021, 03:28 AM
(01-08-2021, 01:12 AM)pbrower2a Wrote: Welcome! So you found a way to navigate around the spam! I congratulate you!
9/11 will be twenty years in the past on September 11, 2021, and that is enough time for youth to fully reach adulthood without having it seared into individual or collective consciousness. More significant for the cohorts born between 2001 and now will be the disruption that COVID-19 inflicts on rites of passage that usually appear at set times. There will be school, childhood clubs, religious ceremonies, and the usual coming-of-age events. The only coming-of-age event that ill not be disrupted is voting.
Figuring that COVID-19 messes up one year of K-12 education, kids who used to graduate at 18 will often graduate at age 19. Figuring that a summer vacation can distract from learning in some environments and being an enriching experience in others... we are going to see greater disparities in educational results.
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January 6, 2021 will be one of the most remarkable days in American history for rioters disrupting a usually-sedate but essential ceremony, the official count of electoral votes. We will not know the full effects for some time We all knew that Donald Trump would be a one-term President once the vote started coming in from such places as Atlanta, Detroit, Milwaukee, Philadelphia, Phoenix, and Pittsburgh. More was decided in the last spill-over of the 2020 election, to wit two run-off special elections in Georgia for two Senate seats. Those would decide the effective majority in the US Senate
I predict that the cult of personality associated with Donald Trump has shattered, and the extreme polarization that has bedeviled American politics for about twenty years may start to recede. We may be seeing the final stage of the Crisis of 2020. The end is nigh for COVID-19 (if hardly nigh enough for my taste, which means that I get the vaccine), and if its killing is on the scale of a modern "shooting war" is not yet over, it is easy to imagine the end of carnage that competent leadership can hardly avoid treating as a war. Donald Trump looks to become a scapegoat for much that has gone wrong in this Crisis from COVID-19 to the perverse spectacle in the Capitol building. People who thought that they could use him seem to be ditching him.
Will the worst trends of the last forty years vanish? Bad habits that precipitate a Crisis Era force their repudiation. I can start with the 2T "Multiversity" that turns a college education from a rigid program of courses likely to improve a youth and make him or her an inchoate leader (whether as a CPA, shop steward, clergy, nurse, research scientist...) who recognizes that there is more to life than bureaucratic power, material indulgence. sex, intoxicants, and mass low culture. What sort of education does one need to value such things? None at all! To be sure, bureaucratic power typically requires a college degree as proof of ability to cope with... well, bureaucracy. This said, the Boomer executives that many of us know too well have waxed rich by treating workers badly. I question how sustainable that is.
Maybe we go from plutocracy to a social market.
Thanks. I appreciate it. January 6, 2021 will definitely go down as one of the most infamous days in American history. I wonder if this could be a possible marker for determining the Millennial/Gen Z cutoff.