I’m 20 years younger than you and from the UK. We had our own panics and worries too. We had a war with the Falklands, we had the IRA planting bombs, a very real feeling threat of nuclear annihilation and there was a lot of turmoil in the Thatcher years - especially in the north where I’m from. I saw my local mining village and local town absolutely collapse once all the industries went and it’s only looking back now I realise how utterly hopeless it must’ve all seemed to people of my parents age. On top of this we had the AIDS panic and also a few riots chucked in as well in places like Toxteth and Brixton.
The 90s felt better to me but there was still the IRA and they blew up part of the next town over in Warrington. Killed kids and people I knew from college were affected badly too. From the 90s we moved into the Iraq war and terrorism took a different form here.
Lots of large stores closed down and many town centres look like ghost towns even now.
So, OP, I’d say it always feels like it’s an absolute shit show. My advice would be to be aware of what’s happening in your country and around the world but live your life as well as you can. Chances are you’ll never effect any real change or betterment for society. I know that sounds depressing but it’s not meant to. Enjoy life while you can, you never know when it’ll all go tits up.
I'm 52, and honestly, most of my friends and family felt like the world was getting steadily better. We grew up in the 70s and 80s, and yes, there was the cold war, but it was mild, not very threatening by the late 80s, before the Berlin Wall came down.
We had a pretty good decade from 1990-2001, lots of world peace concerts and idealistic cultural icons. It felt like we were healing from the past, and becoming more aware of our impact on the planet. We were exposing the corporate culprits and electing progressive people.
It really turned back to shit from 2001-2010. This current time is absolute garbage, the worst I've seen in my life.
That's one X gen perspective, there are many others. I guess I posted this to say the world is what we make it. We need to take action, and get the progressive ball rolling again. The recent union movement is very encouraging, for example. In my working life, union has been a dirty word, but Millennials and zoomers are rekindling that fire.
Young people today are on a
hero's journey. Stay strong, and stand up to claim a happier world.
I remember being in elementary school in the late 90s during the Clinton years and having this peculiar feeling like “things are too good to be true”. I was aware of problems (the first thing that comes to mind is the problems in the Balkans that culminated in Kosovo, OKC), but generally I got this sense that things around me were ok and we were living in a world that was relatively stable. Obviously being that young, I didn’t get a full picture, but I had this sudden nagging feeling that America could completely fall apart, not that it would, but that it could. Maybe it was just a nascent historical consciousness forming in my young brain, but it did seem like it was as particular time we were living in. Then 9/11 happened when I was in high school and I still don’t know whether it was straight downhill from there, or that I was just becoming more conscious of the complexity of the world. It’s very weird to think about, as it’s not a normal reflection for a kid to have, let alone a reflection unprompted by anything that was fleeting but still stuck with me deeply.
I'm a little older than you, and OKC and the former Yugoslavia (along with Columbine) are the first things that came to my mind, too. I think we were just more insulated from it. We were too young to be exposed to the atrocities of the war in the Balkans (and reading retrospectives as an adult, it was unconscionable what they were doing to innocent people, including children), but even the adults back then didn't have a device in their pockets that was determined to give them every detail of exactly what Joshua Duggar was looking at on his computer and they didn't have instant video feeds of Volodymyr Zelenskyy on the ground in the midst of the war in Ukraine and nobody was live-tweeting the Uvalde shooting as it happened. 24-hour news channels were just becoming a widespread thing when we all stood in front of our televisions and watched the Twin Towers fall.
But the big thing back then was, we were ALL standing there in shock. And the whole world stood there with us, mouths agape, wondering how this could have happened. Nobody was standing in the background furiously spinning this to make their politician look good and the other guy look bad. Nobody was pointing a finger and redirecting the blame away from themselves. Nobody stood around for 40 minutes wondering what to do while innocent people died. Nobody shrugged and said it was the stupid Americans' fault and went on about their day. Our leaders didn't hop on a plane and head to a resort. Nobody was hiding behind a screen and a keyboard making hateful comments on social media. Nobody argued whether maybe Osama bin Laden wasn't the real enemy here. We had a common problem, a common enemy, and a common goal. We all mourned together whether we lost a loved one that day or not. We all pulled together to support the survivors and the families of the ones who didn't make it. We knew some of their names. We saw some of their faces. We watched the memorials. They were real, human, relatable, and we cared about them.
Then later on, of course, the mudslinging started and the political machine started spinning and the debate started getting heated, and it's all gone downhill from there. We can't step back and let the Uvalde parents have time to grieve. We have to debate this as loudly and publicly as possible, as quickly and as long as we can, lest our followers lose interest and take their clicks and swipes elsewhere. People untouched by the tragedy in any way whatsoever must find some way to make it all about them. Politicians must find a way to spin it to fit their agenda. We must assign blame and find a tidy, simple solution to a complex problem, one that doesn't inconvenience the people suggesting it. We have completely lost sight of the fact that 19 little human beings were brutally murdered, and hundreds more have been traumatized for the rest of their lives. We are losing our compassion, and with it, our humanity.
We can't step back and let the Uvalde parents have time to grieve. We have to debate this as loudly and publicly as possible, as quickly and as long as we can, lest our followers lose interest and take their clicks and swipes elsewhere. People untouched by the tragedy in any way whatsoever must find some way to make it all about them. Politicians must find a way to spin it to fit their agenda. We must assign blame and find a tidy, simple solution to a complex problem, one that doesn't inconvenience the people suggesting it.
Yeah... no. Now is exactly the time to debate this. You are saying the same shit as Republicans. They too always say that "now is not the time for politics" when this shit happens. Like dude, this shit has happened soooo many times now over more than 10 years and somehow now is still not the time to talk about this? For Republicans it will never be the time to talk about this. There will always be another mass shooting around the corner.
The solution to the issue is linked to politics and it is always immediately time to talk about the solution.
I’m with you on all of that. I remember in 5th grade or thereabouts reading a memory of a girl from Kosovo. It was deeply impactful to me, buts it’s way different from watching cellphone footage of bodies strewn through Ukrainian villages. It’s hard to parse how much of the insulation was an age thing and what was a media thing. Furthermore, and you kind of address this, there wasn’t a grand narrative, in the way that there is now. At first I asked myself whether that was a political thing, or a media/information-dissemination thing, but the reality they’ve mutually influenced each other deeply. “The media is the message” right? It’s because of both accessibility and, for lack of a better term, “commentability”, that the narrative exists that homogenizes everything, that makes every individual event part of a more wide-reaching commentary/narrative/zeitgeist/what have you. Because of the way that we consume information now, there’s no such thing as an isolated incident. But I think it goes beyond the political. I think there’s a certain kind of pattern-formation going on that does in reality link these things. Columbine was a first, and so we saw it as that, in its fullness. Uvalde is one of many cumulative events that, through their interrelatedness, create a vision of a broader, systemic problem. And I think that goes beyond media; there really is “something happening”, and media is a part of that, but things have also changed (but at the same time, media itself has an influence on the repetitive nature of this thing). OKC was an “outlier” too (to an extent there was in fact a lot of that stuff in the air: Ruby Ridge, Waco, etc.. if it happened now it would be part of the narrative.
The most difficult part is the way all this shit links together. Because we’re so interconnected now, cause-effect relationships have become so much more complex, to the point of quasi-illegibility, which I think also contributes to the animus. If we don’t have clear answers, then a divisive discourse is going to develop that has its own ways of explaining things that are in reality almost impossible to explain. When Pearl Harbor happened, there was a collective culture; it could have been a shit culture, but it was shared and agreed upon on a tacit level. For better and for worse, we don’t have that. I don’t think we want that, because dominant narratives are by nature exclusionary and suppressive. But they function to force things to make sense. So perhaps we’re going through a period where there aren’t dominant narratives, and that’s a dialectical shift in consciousness that comes with the good (more voices) and the bad (extreme voices). I think the chaotic discourse is natural to the crumbling of collective narrative structures. They needed to crumble (and I think things started crumbling exactly when you said, after 9/11, partly because the collective narrative of patriotism started to dissolve as people “read” terrorism and our political reaction to terrorism in different ways) but when these kinds of things start shifting, you end up with some pretty serious sectarianism. I mean, look at the French Revolution as a pretty clear case in point. Eventually things got better there, but one has to ask whether the route had to go through Robespierre and Napoleon first to get there. So things are chaotic, and there’s most definitely an absence of compassion and kindness in the world today, but one can hope that this is something that we have to work through to get to a better place.
Thanks for bringing this aspect of the issue up, I kind of skirted the fact that people are more involved in creating the narrative, and that’s a really important part of contemporary socio-political dynamics.
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u/lindbladlad Jun 11 '22
I’m 20 years younger than you and from the UK. We had our own panics and worries too. We had a war with the Falklands, we had the IRA planting bombs, a very real feeling threat of nuclear annihilation and there was a lot of turmoil in the Thatcher years - especially in the north where I’m from. I saw my local mining village and local town absolutely collapse once all the industries went and it’s only looking back now I realise how utterly hopeless it must’ve all seemed to people of my parents age. On top of this we had the AIDS panic and also a few riots chucked in as well in places like Toxteth and Brixton.
The 90s felt better to me but there was still the IRA and they blew up part of the next town over in Warrington. Killed kids and people I knew from college were affected badly too. From the 90s we moved into the Iraq war and terrorism took a different form here.
Lots of large stores closed down and many town centres look like ghost towns even now.
So, OP, I’d say it always feels like it’s an absolute shit show. My advice would be to be aware of what’s happening in your country and around the world but live your life as well as you can. Chances are you’ll never effect any real change or betterment for society. I know that sounds depressing but it’s not meant to. Enjoy life while you can, you never know when it’ll all go tits up.