Is it just me or is the 21st century....rather boring?

[pbrower2a]

(04-27-2020, 01:42 PM)Isoko Wrote: Stagnant is a good word Warren. I like it. 
Even still by boring I mean let's take a look at what has happened in the last 20 years compared to a century ago.

1900 - 1920

The amount of events and technological change in just 20 years is astounding. It is almost revolutionary. Bloody, very bloody, but a very revolutionary period in just a short space of time.

2000 - 2020

9/11 - horrible event but led to continued occupations in the middle East that still exist to this day. No real major changes in terms of life.

2008 - Banking crisis but overall the system is stabilised and life goes on.

2020 - Disruptive and is yet to be truly tested on what happens but as is the case in the 21st it is likely to be another life goes on event.

So these are, in my eyes, the big three events. Arab Civil War? Very predictable and has not changed the world in a huge way. Crimea? Not that big of a deal in the long run.

Tech changes have mainly been internet and social based like gay marriage. But overall not exactly major. I cannot list down all the events between 1900 -1920 as it is too big to cover. But I can for 2000 - 2020 and they all seem pretty stagnant and non changing in the long run.

Honestly, I don't expect life to change much in 20 years aside from my driverless cars. Perhaps more automation. But overall more of the same.

You are fairly new to this Forum, and you get to see some of my stock themes. 

9/11 was undeniably a 3T event.  At this you are completely right. The list of sports stars going into military service at the expense of lucrative careers in WWII was amazing. Likewise film stars. The government imposed rationing quickly and practically shut down consumer production. Residential and commercial construction might be completed, but after that it all came to a screeching halt. War needs came first because... well, everyone already knew what the demonic Axis Powers were doing at the start of their conquests. People became much less mobile. 

Contrast WWII to 9/11. Only one major sports star enlisted (Pat Tillman). Film stars? Pop musicians? Nope. The President told us to go shopping and travel. That is very much a 3Y response. After that the President rode a speculative boom in housing... America was going into the sort of bubble that leads directly into a 1929-style crash. 

2008 -- maybe it stabilized too quickly to allow an era of major reforms to proceed. The politicians agreed to stanch the meltdown after about a year and a half instead of waiting three years as in 1929-1932. They rescued the financial system about at the same stage at which the destructive bank runs began in 1931 and the super-rich got to recover . The same super-rich bought the political system piecemeal until 2016 when those elites were capable of establishing one of the purest plutocracies on Earth. Perhaps in consummate bad wisdom they saw Donald Trump, one of their own, as just the thing to put a populist spin on a reactionary agenda 

Unfortunately for them Trump has proved an absurdity even if he supported everything that they want. The 2018 election showed that mass politics were incompatible with the Trump agenda -- and that of Corporate America -- an economy with monopolized pricing, exorbitant rents, brutal management, and abysmal pay. 

2020 -- The last three Crises culminated in bloody wars, including the three that cost the largest shares of the American population as military casualties of all time (WWII, the American Revolution, and the Civil War. 25,000 military deaths doesn't sound so severe for the American Revolution may not seem so bad until one sees how small the population was at the time.  Losing 2.83% of the population (Civil War), 1.00% (American Revolution), and 0.307%  (WWII) -- even when the latter had the best generalship and had the system doing everything to rescue the injured -- marks those wars as Crisis Wars. Next-closest is the War of 1812, at .207%  -- more a botched war than anything else. 

On the other hand we have been enduring no war, but certainly the casualties of a very nasty war. For a month America has been losing about 2000 people a day, which is an obscene death rate. The system that we have would fire or retire a general who got a similar death rate at least in respect to his share of the responsibility. We try to keep our losses down. As George S. Patton put it, the secret of winning a war is not to die for your country -- but instead to make the poor bastard on the other side die for his! Patton had a very high casualty rate -- if the casualties were Germans, including injuries, deaths, and captures. 

 The deaths from COVID-19 resemble those of a badly-administered war.  I would never confuse Trump with any of our leading political figures of the American Revolution, and certainly not Abraham Lincoln or FDR. 

Americans are typically treating this plague as if it were a Crisis War, drastically curtailing much behavior  that they consider normal and even necessary for being human. We are taking great economic losses. We could do that only on knowing the alternatives. Bad as it is to find life economically deprived and especially lonely, boring, and frustrating, such is better than... dead. In this Crisis death almost never comes with some feeling of purpose. Nobody is going to get any medals.  

I certainly do not want to be a prisoner of a ventilator that gives me only a 20% chance of survival.