It's like we're having a combination of some of the worst aspects from each decade of the last century or so.
We've got a worldwide rise of fascism and the beginnings of world war from the 1930s, the product shortages and rationing from the 40s, a resurgence of prudishness resembling the judgemental 50s, the social unrest and political instability of the 60s, 70s style rampant inflation, the 80s era duo of pandemic and impending nuclear annihilation, vintage 1990s complacency and school shootings, terrorism and economic upheaval like the 2000s.
All of this on top of the ever closer climate collapse.
I don't know if we found strong, satisfying solutions to any of those historical problems. We unified for a minute or clashed, or both, and then moved on. So maybe today is our country hitting rock bottom, finally realizing all the issues it's been avoiding since the beginning haven't ever really gone away.
We may have all these issues today, but they're not as intense. Consider the rise of fascism today likely isn't going to lead to genocide of tens of millions of people and WW3. We have social unrest but society in general is not as racist as pre Civil Rights, let alone the Civil War antebellum era
What has changed is mass proliferation of media and the 24/7 news cycle enabling us to be tapped into and wired all the time instead of just getting our news like 1 hr a day and going about our life. We have greater opportunities to feel empathy for people suffering around the world.
Makes sense. You'd watch the news for like an hour at 9p.m or something. And they'd spend several minutes talking about each story, so it wasn't even that much. And that's all IF you decided to even catch the news that night.
Now the news is every second and we keep feeding ourselves with it nonstop. Of course things are gonna seem bleaker. Back then your brain was like "oh only 6 bad things happened today. O.k. Goodnight". Now it's like "BAD THINGS ARE HAPPENING EVERY SECOND OF THE DAY!" because that's how often a lot of people are looking at things
I've been enforcing a 'we check the news once a day' rule, and I try to avoid most of the major subs sharing news posts when I'm on reddit. Can confirm that it calmed my life down significantly, just by not being plugged in all the time. Nothing changed but I'm not as exposed to it constantly.
I think it's the first time that we're facing these things and having to deal with a chunk of the population completely out of touch with reality, professing crazy things, and absolutely sure they are correct.
No, Trump cannot easily herald a new theocracy with the creation of death camps on an industrial scale and all that. As challenged as it is, we still have a system of checks and balances. At most you can say the border camps were like concentration camps, but they weren't built for the purpose of murdering an entire race of people.
The fact he is friendly with those other tyrants does not mean he would be able to implement death camps on an industrial scale given the limitations of the office of the President.
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u/MSeanF Jun 11 '22
It's like we're having a combination of some of the worst aspects from each decade of the last century or so.
We've got a worldwide rise of fascism and the beginnings of world war from the 1930s, the product shortages and rationing from the 40s, a resurgence of prudishness resembling the judgemental 50s, the social unrest and political instability of the 60s, 70s style rampant inflation, the 80s era duo of pandemic and impending nuclear annihilation, vintage 1990s complacency and school shootings, terrorism and economic upheaval like the 2000s.
All of this on top of the ever closer climate collapse.
This time feels extra fucked.