One of the consistent themes on this blog is that life is improving faster and for more people than we generally acknowledge. Usually I defend this by showing rising trends in big-picture subjects like crime, poverty, income, happiness, and so forth.
But this is kind of bloodless, so I'm glad to welcome the fine folks at Reason to the "Cheer up!" caucus. No charts here, just "40 Ways Things Are Getting Better."
This is a more eclectic list than mine, ranging from lower crime rates to better pot quality and tolerable non-alcoholic beer. Oddly, they don't include some obvious candidates like smartphones and fast vaccine development, but I suppose you're always bound to miss a few things.
Now, there are some bad trends too. CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere. The Black-white education gap. The conservative descent into Trumpism. What's more, I understand that we're all totally frazzled by 18 months of COVID-19, which makes this an inopportune moment to persuade people that things are better than they think.
But they are! Not every single thing, of course, but almost all of us are generally better off today than we were 20 years ago. Why, according to Reason, even those of you who live in weather-challenged states can get avocados these days. What more do you want?
Unlike Brett Kavanaugh, I don't really like beer because alcohol makes me feel yuck. However, I will endorse the new craft, non-alcoholic beers. They're really very good.
I wouldn’t say I’m better off than before. I’m still employed. I’ve had no lasting serious financial setback. I’ve ridden the waves and haven’t drowned. I’m 20 years older. I’m still riding the waves in a hurricane.
But I hate this country, my so called fellow citizens, the local / state / federal government and the media which purports to entertain me. I am not entertained. My interests are not served. The government doesn’t not govern. It exploits and pursues it’s own interests which are clearly in conflict with mine.
So while I appreciate the glass half full viewpoint expressed here…. It’s nonsense.
The future is dark. There is no point in pretending otherwise. Our better days are in the past. It’s all downhill from here. Good luck!
I'm inclined to agree. Kevin can cherrypick as many numbers as he wants but this country is a lot worse off than it was 20 years ago in terms of cooperation and trust. We trust each other and our government much less than we did in 2001 and our global standing is nowhere near what it used to be. The list that Kevin shares are mostly material things. Those things don't matter if trust in each other is abysmally low and polarization has gotten worse over the decades.
The list that Kevin shares are mostly material things.
I don't think the following affects the majority of Americans—and maybe not even a particularly large percentage—but clearly non-trivial numbers of Americans (by my count at least 80 million, and that's being highly conservative in what metros I'm including) live in urban centers that have been adversely affected by reduced housing affordability over the last two decades. Obviously this doesn't apply to everyone who lives in those cities (and obviously plenty of people—ie homeowners—have benefited from the run-up in property prices).
But clearly a modest rise in wages or benefits (or cheaper consumer goods, or what have you) is small consolation if you've become "housing insecure" over the years. This is a big problem that has intensified in the new century, and in my view swamps the purported increase in material well-being for ever-growing numbers of Americans. There has also been an associated increase in homelessness in a number of US metros, and this, of course, affects even the non-unhoused in terms of quality of life.
I would suggest that "We trust each other and our government much less than we did in 2001 " represents reality kicking in, and that's a good thing. I haven't believed a statement from the White House, absent independent corroboration, since Kennedy was president, and I was only eight when he was assassinated.
Your government, local, state, or federal, Democratic or Republican, is just NOT trustworthy, and people who persist in trusting or believing government are delusional. If a declining portion of the population is delusional, that's progress.
Of course you can trust the government, it is just that you have to be cautious when it comes to where politicians are directly involved.
You don't trust the CDC, DOJ, FBI, EPA, NASA, SS administration, Medicare, Medicaid, ...?
You don't trust the courts? I can show you countries where you truly can't trust the courts.
You don't trust the police, and you think they are corrupt? I can show you countries where there is real police corruption.
You don't trust the military to be effective in assignments given to them by civilian authorities?
Perhaps I should have been clearer. You can't trust elected officials of either party at any level of government. Far too many people start every new administration trusting the president, only to become disillusioned before long.
While it's certainly true that there are countries where the apparatus of law enforcement is worse than it is in the US, there are also countries where it is much better; you really can't trust American police not to use excessive force.
The federal administrative agencies generally do a good job; it appears that this is not always true at the state and local level.
I’ll admit it. I’m angry at anti-vaxxers and anti maskers. They are messing up our lives and plans. Yet only their anger is covered by the media? We get stories about how our officials are “frustrated” and “saddened” by their failure to get vaccinated. Where are the stories of our anger toward these “vaccine deniers and right wing loonies”?
https://digbysblog.net/2021/09/10/im-angry-at-anti-maskers-anti-vaxxers-this-is-what-im-doing-about-it-spockosbrain/
Another limo liberal, more slobber. 2/3's of American adult's are vaccinated. 70% of whites. Your point is dead. Vaccines don't stop "cases" dude.
The last thing I care about is… you. Count me among the angry and vaccinated.
And look… the freak below still wants to crack jokes about Russians.
I don’t care much about that freaks welfare either. Please both provide notice of your impending suffering/ death so I can cheer you to the end.
I think you missed my point. And the point of that quotation.
I've read lots of op-eds about the increasing rage of the vaccinated towards the trumoy hold-outs. Another comes up every few days.
You hate Russia?
... But you work for the government!
Indeed. My performance is intended to make you hate your government.
You're the Harold Crick of FSB.
And the FSB knows where you live, i imagine. Especially given your skill at outing their operatives.
"But I hate this country, my so called fellow citizens, the local / state / federal government, ..."
Of course you can always leave.
“It was the best of times and getting better all the time”
Kevin “Pangloss” Drum
Sounds like a promising beginning to a good farce.
Trumpism???? Enough of that term. Capitalism died in 2008. I could argue 1929, but 2008 is the year it died. Years of debt based growth after 1979. Struggles of building real profits and the industrial revolution capital expenditure decreasing. Growth is hard without science driven miracles. It's not natural.
Without bailouts, I doubt Drum is even alive today. I doubt the U.S. Existence. Nothing lasts forever. What began after the black death, a blink in the moment of historical time.
So, are the End-stage Kapitalism touters in the fauxgressive left time travellers from 1924?
Yes, a lot of things are getting better, but for social conservative revolutionaries that only accentuates their sense of disorientation and disenfranchisement, and they will focus even more on finding justification for their dismodia, and will seek out conflict wherever they can.
This is what's really behind Republican governor's response to covid, they feel they're justified in expressing conflict for it's own sake.
Conservatives and Climate Change, both have an outsized impact counterbalancing all the things that are improving, and neither have easy answers to improve them.
Imagine attacking the pandemic like we did smallpox how much better off we'd be, but the right will continue to to argue for whatever the opposite of what the science, sense and the Left advocate because "owning the Libs". Without that changing the Climate is going to suck out every last bit of slack the economy can offer for anything on the "better" list.
It's going to be a very rough century.
Rougher than the 20th? By this time in the 20th they had the 1st and 2nd Crimean Wars, WW1, Russian Revolution/Civil War...etc etc etc.
Water wars and mass migrations with growing areas that will no longer be habitable. The areas that will need relief from more chaotic weather. Everything you listed were bad, but they were regional. Think more like 1816, the year with no summer
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_Without_a_Summer
but hot instead of cold and the impact likely won't stabilize till the next century at best. There's going to be lots of ancillary regional effects as this plays out and that includes all new large horrifying wars, but this time with robots!
This is another reason Peter King, Football Knower, Coffee Fiend, IPA Burnout, & Springsteen Superfan, pisses me off: in his Football Morning in America column two weeks ago, he lamented our unwillingness to pipe water from the wet East (the Great Lakes, I assume) to the dry West.
& the man considers himself a progressive sort. (& I mean, yeah, he is the father of two daughters, one of them gay, but in the end his solutions are as cellophane thin as those presented by like minded daughter-havers in sports media SportsBoi Bill Simmons & Champagne Socialist Drew Magary. PK is a doughy dilettante, the shape of Jacobin staffers to come.)
That is because 20th century capitalism lived off of fossil fuels, especially the mid/late half. They don't think it can operate without it. Their problem is, capitalism is dead anyways. It doesn't matter.
The reason the Maralago Caliphate chose to try to do nothing about COVID is the GQP bought it's own bullshit about Obummer's response to Ebola: in 2014, they convinced their voters -- & apparently, themselves -- that Barry Hussein golfed & otherwise lazed about while America found itself in the grip of an Ebola outbreak... then, only four people died. So, while lamenting that Barry did nothing got the GQP another midterm election triumph, it actually solved the problem. & why would the Rona be any different than the Bola?
Pretty sure the Venn Diagram of Glibertaria & Antivaxxxia is close to concentric circles, so not a surprise that Nick Gillespie's Playpen is not singing hosannas for Dr. Fauci's microchipping of America being for the benefit of MrKike*.
*Soros.
"Not every single thing, of course, but almost all of us are generally better off today than we were 20 years ago."
Don't know about you, but twenty years ago I was twenty years younger.
So you think.
Amen! And my parents were still alive.
Behold the master race,
https://i.redd.it/ht5mfnrgyij71.jpg
It's called body positivity, blob shamers!
Best part is wearing the Rothschild flag.
Happy to have no idea what you mean.
Uh, you know about the CSA bankrollers, we're the house of Rothschild. It's whyCzar Alexander the 2nd sent Lincoln Navel support and warned him about his old enemy stirring up trouble. That picture is pretty old, but represents stupid peckers. They know little about history. Serve the masters they do.
That's ridiculous and not even partly real.
https://www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/russia/forrel-us-civil-war.htm
Nigh. The navel ships were to support the union blockade. Put Alexander II, Lincoln and de Rothschild into the search. I use pads for this site.
Benjamin Judah was right there: an actual Jew, who really did exist, & was in Jefferson Davis's closet... I mean, cabinet.
Why make up Sorosian stories about supposed European moneymen funding the Southern Partisanship?
Judah P. Benjamin. Not Benjamin Judah.
I am still surprised Kurt Cousins & Adam Thielen havn't asked to change their jersey numbers to 14 & 88.
Can you imagine the response from their team's Jewish owners? (Then again, the Wilves have been mum on Kurt's unwillingness to vax, so who knows? Maybe they are more Kushner than we knew.)
I said years ago we should have gone for Kaepernick.
Thanks.
I would say I was doing it Chinese style & going last name first, but it was a simple error on my part.
Keep definitely owns your rivals the Packers.
Would have been the smart NFC North play.
And then all you get are Nazi websites.
Try history without the conspiracy theories, it's far more meaningful.
I, for one, could use about a 6 month vacation. In my bed. With other people bringing me beer.
I have a question. Are you measuring in aggregate or per capita?
and is it corrected for inflation?
Shh, there’s a narrative to be maintained…
> almost all of us are generally better off today than we were 20 years ago
20 years ago, I was 41 and my wife was cuter.
One thing that indicates things are getting better, at least compared to 40 years ago, is the reaction to the covid virus .
This is not really a very deadly pandemic compared to past things like the Spanish flu . And not extraordinarily worse than the Hong Kong flu in the 60s in terms of years of life lost per capita . Covid looks to be maybe 5 times worse in total deaths but much more weighted to elderly and pre existing conditions.
I am old enough to remember 1968 . And I have no real recollection of the Hong Kong flu at all. Did not really shut anything down then at all. People went on with their lives and just coped.
Today, the reaction is more extreme as people expect more safety than they used to do. They accepted risks as inevitable more back then and we just took for granted that we could not fix everything.
People expect more safety today as they generally are safer .
I think you're right people today expect more safety, but you're glossing over the very significant disparity in overall lethality between the 1968-1970 event and the current pandemic. According to the Wiki article, at minimum the current pandemic is 3-4 times deadlier in the United States than the Hong Kong flu was, and might well be more like 6-7 times more deadly. That's using the high end estimate for US Hong flu deaths (100K) and the official US covid death toll (650K)—the latter of which is most definitely an undercount. And needless, to say, vaccines have been much more widely employed for covid than for that influenza outbreak, and also, frighteningly, the current plague seems far from over.
I know not everyone agrees with my take (probably not you, for starters), but, given the overall parameters of this illness, a strategy of "serious but non-draconian* measures to keep as many people alive as possible until vaccines arrive" seems wholly justified.
*I write non-draconian because, while cumbersome, the various restrictions employed to fight the pandemic strike me as just that, and don't make life significantly less comfortable for most people living in high income countries:
1) masking;
2) take out/delivery instead of indoor restaurant dining;
3) jettisoning a nasty commute in favor of a laptop in one's living room;
4) streaming a movie instead of going to the cinema;
5) temporarily confining in-person get-togethers to outdoors, at arm's length;
6) a significant reduction in some types of economic activity that was nonetheless a) temporary and b) made good via government money
7) travel restrictions.
Sure, one can look at covid-fighting restrictions using a glass-half empty approach if one wants to, and we can all come up with a few, not-so-widespread counterexamples. But what I've written above mostly covers the impact of covid restrictions (not covid itself, of course) for the bulk of citizens in rich countries. Unfortunately in MAGA America, we couldn't even manage this modest effort.
Errr, nope. Look at the 1890's for the on again off again oc43 coronavirus outbreak. It was on....then off. Then on.
Too much stuff you said is a waste and stops the building of cases immunity.
Perhaps a trivial matter in the overall scheme of Things that Be, but one of the nice things about streaming a movie at home is that I can play around with the video settings -- to a certain extent -- to display the film as _I_ think it should be displayed. Yes, I intensely dislike the whole 'colors that pop' theory of movie-making. The corollary, which I'm sure you've seen coming from light-days away, is that I intensely dislike "let's second-guess the original" artifices like 'colorizing' old movies or remixing mono releases to some hypothetical stereo equivalent. No, that's not being a snob. Quite the contrary.
The frustrating thing is that ventilation is the second most important thing after vaccination. A massive infrastructure buildout for schools and public building ventilation, new regulations for air flow for private buildings, liberal ise of air purifiers with HEPA filters (the fancy stuff doesn't work or is a con) and these numbers would be super fucking down. Ideal goal is 800 ppm c02, but even 1000 ppm c02 would make a huge dent in cases and we could do stuff inside.
Better ventilation would translate into massive public health gains, for sure. But you're talking about a mind-bogglingly expensive intervention. There are 130,000 K-12 schools in America. And that's to say nothing of post-secondary institutions. Or daycares. Or nursing homes. Or apartment buildings. Or hotels. We know that vastly cheaper steps are available, because a number of countries have managed to squelch community transmission of covid to negligible levels. None of them did what you're suggesting to get there.
Sounds like the Green New Deal demanding retrofitting all buildings to modern environmental compliance.
Note that one reason we have poor ventilation is environmental policies to reduce energy usage.
In order to heat and cool more efficiently with less energy, buildings have been made so that air is more sealed in. The more outside air you circulate, the better ventilation but higher energy usage to heat or cool that outside air.
There are always trade offs .
Sounds like the Green New Deal demanding retrofitting all buildings to modern environmental compliance.
I hope the public health information we've gained as a result of this crisis informs lots of areas of human endeavor moving forward, building codes included. Proper ventilation is humanity's friend in a pandemic; of that there is zero doubt. And there are climate change mitigation implications, too. I just think the gargantuan cost of doing what needs to be done—and the time involved (surely a full retrofit would take many years)— means that "renovating our way to proper ventilation" is a not-very-likely-to-be-effective real time intervention when it comes to the current crisis.
I would not count CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere as one of "some bad things too". My kids swore never to have kids themselves, and things are better because they can buy avocados?
"My kids swore never to have kids themselves...." this is an extremely serious statement that I, unfortunately, am going to gloss over to agree with Mr. Drum...(your kids are very likely correct in their thinking....wise beyond either of us...but that is a different discussion).
1. The advances in medicine have been phenomenal...neither Kevin nor myself would probably be alive and functioning well without this steady increase medical efficacy on extending useful lifespans.
2. Think of Automobiles, and grated this is more than 20 years ago and dates me, but as a lad I worked in a filling station patching inter-tube tires...and I am certain I could still be very good at it.
No double downdraft corroborators as was on my MG-TF...a used British sports car to be sure, but it actually had wooden floors, really...I had to get rid of the car because the floor rotted out.
Steel belted radial ties now that go for 50,000 miles or more...and on and on. I had a runflat spare tire on my BMW...traded in for a dependable Honda Accord recently but, at a service recently we had to (apparently) bleed the break lines...they wouldn't let me do it even though I was a breakman at Valley Beak after getting back from Vietnam. It is all computerized now. (BTW, the Accord is a great car, as big as my living room maybe, but recently drove up to Yellowstone, 39.4 MPG combined and never worried about a thing. We always were worried about something on older cars!)
Two more quick notes because I must get back to work...but I remember also as a lad to help support the family, I cleaned stainless steel x-ray developing tanks that every dental office had...cleaned them with nitric acid...an incredibly dangerous job for a lad...and of course I had all the office keys...for myself and safe keeping.
What a time!
Lastly, contra Kevin, very long ago I grew up on an Eastern farm where we did not have indoor plumbing...and so of course only an outhouse.
But it was a very happy childhood...dirt poor though we were.
Go figure.
Traveller
In re your patched tires: It used to be something of a rite of passage to have dads show their firstborns how to tune a car ... with a timing light. And don't forget those local ariel (antenna to hoi poi) raising festivals in days gone by.
happiness is not found in things, but in relationships.
John Lennon learned this too late about firearms.
1. I was happy as a kid, now the world's a mess. Translation--you're now feeling what your parents were going through when you were a kid.
2. We have so much more stuff now. Translation--see George Carlin:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MvgN5gCuLac
3. In many ways, this is the best time to be alive--too bad people insist on ruining it. It would be interesting to see correlation of "happiness" with changes in lifespans for given groups. and/or waves of drug addiction (symptoms of societal dysfunction).
While things have been improving for most people, the rate of improvement for wage-earners has been very poor compared to how it was in the past. This diagram uses a wage index from the Economic History project, corrected with the CPI:
http://www.skeptometrics.org/WageIndex.png
Real wages have improved very little since the early 70's. Using the PCE index which shows less inflation would give more upward slant to both curves - the choice of index does not affect how inequality has grown. And Kevin's diagrams would not look so good if he showedthe CPI, which is what he uses in other contexts.
People in the lower percentiles - the majority of people - just don't have the expectation of improvement that they had throughout US history until the late 60's. The economy has not been working for them in the way that it did before then. The economy has been great for the 1% and especially for the 0.1%.
Of course things have improved very rapidly in China and some other developing countries, partly because of international trade. Wage-earners in the US correctly see that the other countries and the rich in the US are benefiting at their expense.
Agreed. I'm much better off - living off a lifetime of working hard and saving my money plus Social Security. Try driving around the interior of the country, outside of the big cities, and check out if they look better off. A lot of dead or dying areas... and a way of life that has become unsupportable. So now the people go to the cities, separated from their roots, and become a cog in the machinery. It works for some, not for all.
Farms don't need nearly as many people now--so farm town collapse. Typically as one area sheds workers, another picks them up. But now, it's mainly service, read elder care, that needs people and does not pay well. In many ways, the middle class is being hollowed out. Green energy jobs can start to pick up some of the slack, and maybe even help some farm towns--but only with large investments now.
This also makes Democrat Leadership Council kvetching about Biden's Infrastructure Reconciliation including reupping the inheritance tax on family farms all the more ludicrous: how many family farms remain?
And in this instance a chart showing “Annual Consumption Growth” … yet in this age of climate change and the existential threat it poses, is consumption growth actually a good thing?
We are also still near the peak of the longest economic expansion in history (since 1854). The last recession was only a couple of months and was not the type of bad financial collapse that really costs jobs permanently, it was a deliberate and (hopefully) temporary shutdown. Another one of those bad collapses is inevitable - they have always happened. Things will look worse at the bottom of that cycle.
This makes me so sad, because I agree with it. Media, both conservative and liberal, have incentives to hype the most negative stories of the other side. Most of these are not representative, but they just serve to make people angry and this is the result. Doing it for the clicks is going to wind up getting all of us killed. The ad-supported internet is going to wind up being one of the truly terrible inventions in all of human history.
The worst part about it is it becomes a self fulfilling prophecy. If people see portrayals in the media of people supposedly on 'their side' they will think that is how they have to act, even if the people being portrayed were initially fairly fringe.
This all leads to people holding more extreme beliefs, and eventually to the point where people think more and more extreme action is justified because the other side is just that bad. Think riots, terrorism, etc. This isn't limited to just one side. If we have another election where the right wins while getting fewer votes, whether by the rules or if they somehow 'steal' an election they otherwise legitimately lost, the chances for widespread unrest from the left are underdiscussed.
Note that the above comment isn't meant to blame the left for that reaction when it comes. Its just action, reaction. That will keep on until it somehow blows up.
The last twenty years watched the internet destroy culture, gentrification destroy cities, etc etc.
I am financially better off perhaps but on a total scale of “is my life better now”, the answer is a resounding NO. Money really isn’t everything.
If I hadn’t bought a super cheap house pre crisis and pre gentrification, I’d be fucked even with the better money.
In a better timeline, facebook never grew beyond being the new hotornot-dot-com, Gawker got bought out by Dave Eggers & the Mc Sweeney's Gang in 2010 (its best &/or most prominent writers added as contributing editors to the more poppily-cultural BELIEVER!), & the (Celebrity) Apprentice got cancelled after five seasons due to oversaturation (like the original run of Trad Cath Regis Philbin's Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?).
A world of a marginalized Zuckerberg, burntout Trump, & shunted Hot Animal Williamsburg Trustfund Brocialist Machine would be so much better.
10. Being an introvert and/or misanthrope:
there's a taco spot in my neighborhood that lets you order over text and pay on venmo so you don't have to talk to anyone when you want tacos
If you're listing 40 ways life is better in the past 20 years and that's one of them, I'm going to go out on a limb and say that's not a serious list. Sounds more like someone's desperate to find a silver lining. I'm in the hospital, but at least I don't have to do the dishes tonight. I lost my job, but I'm saving a bundle on taxes. My best friend died, but now I don't have to pay him that $10 I borrowed.
Reason says its list is ways we are materially better than before (though many are not material at all). But any material comparison to the past is always going to show things are getting better. Recessions at worst last a year or two, then we start getting richer again. Over time, our gadgets improve, medicine makes new advances, and we find a few new things that we didn't even know we were missing.
But if things are always getting (materially) better, why are we even asking the question? Is it simply that people who think things are getting worse are wrong? Don't they understand the modern miracle of the latest iPhone release? I don't think it's that. I don't think it's just that we're older and that many years closer to death either.
I think that gloom that many people feel is real, and it's not because they're missing the point. There is more to life than new fancy toys and a bigger balance in one's 401(k), and even though knowing that people around the world are climbing out of poverty may be gratifying, there's something closer to home gnawing at our collective soul. A sense that something is very, very wrong. A belief that something bad is about to hit us. There's no chart that can capture what's going on. What is it?
I don't think it's the threat of climate change, the inequities of wealth inequality, the pathologies of social media, or the other usual suspects. They are legitimate worries, part of the problem, but not in themselves what is so exhausting.
My son (born 2005) took a h.s. history class this summer and for one assignment had to write about an event which he could have attended during his lifetime that made him proud of his country. He wrote about the inauguration of Barack Obama. It was hard to think of any alternative so that was the default choice for all the kids, though they were too young to remember it. Even then, though Obama's win was a proud and historic achievement, about half the country wanted the other guy to win.
Today marks 20 years since the 9/11 attacks. For a brief moment, we were more united than ever. We mourned together as one country, we shared the sympathies of people around the world who held America in their hearts like never before.
And everything we did after that was a tragic mistake. We head-faked going after bin Laden but soon diverted those resources to wage a senseless and deceitful war against Iraq. We descended into the insanity of torture. We created a surveillance state based on fear. We became openly hostile toward minorities and immigrants, halting the notable progress we'd made in the post-civil right era. We let high-flyers on Wall Street take the world to the brink of financial collapse, then saved the system but not the millions of individuals who were collateral damage. We witnessed the slowest recovery from a recession since the Great Depression. We elected the most corrupt, ignorant, sociopathic person in our history to be president of the United States and subjected ourselves to four years of nonstop madness. We turned a once-in-a-century pandemic into the most divisive social battle since the Civil War and allowed the disease to kill more people than all the combat deaths in all the wars in our history. Which is where we are today.
And Reason says: Let us praise the wonders of better-tasting non-alcoholic beer.
If you were in my son's class, what other events during the past 20 years have made you proud of your country?
It's an important question, because if you can't name great things your country is doing to make you proud, you start asking, What is the purpose of even having a country. When we're asking that question, we can have an armed insurrection against the seat of our government and millions of people, including one of our two major political parties, will say, So what?
It wasn't always like this. We shared something in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. Before we got bamboozled and divided, we understood what being an American meant. We shared that much in common. We had a tangible sense of the potential for American greatness. We knew firsthand those things that made us proud of our country. We need to find that sense again. We need to give the younger generation new reason to be hopeful and proud.
Otherwise, what's the point?
It was always a mirage. The bamboozlement as you put it, was understanding what being an American meant.
Thanks for sharing your opinion.
I'll put you down for: America Is No Good (Same As It Always Was).
Ok, except for the 9/11. That morning I myself thought wow, some camel jockeys got lucky-- this is pretty sad, not as bad as something like Bophal or a ferry-boat sinking in Brazil, but closer to home. Then the president went scampering off and hid in the deepest hole available, Peggy Noonan told me to turn swarthy guys into the cops if they got lost in the hallway, and half the country started abusing American flags, tattering them on pickup-truck flagpoles. Andrew Sullivan wanted to execute that "American Taliban" kid bad. And all that was window-dressing, the mere outward signs of a country that turned out to be basically chicken-hearted.
This country allowed a man to be president who the only problem he had ever faced was his hair falling out. And we can see how he solved it. It was like seeing that your nose is turning red and fixing it by gluing on a red rubber nose from the circus-supply store. A country doesn't come back from something like that, permitting a clown to stand for it, whatever you think of smart phones and beer that isn't beer.
The rapid development of the vaccines and the Covid tests relied on breakthroughs made in the US. The funding of basic science in the US is a bit of a mess, but it's still the largest in the world. PCR was developed here, sequencing was developed here with a large assist from the human genome project, etc. Even the design of effective vaccines was done here pre-Covid which provide vital in creating effective vaccines to Covid.
Obamacare has made a real difference in peoples lives in the US. Biden was right in his assessment.
Voyager 2 has entered interstellar space (2012).
Barack Obama's First Inaugural? You & your son seem to be aiming low.
What about Perry "The Jewish Kid Rock" Ferrell bringing back Lollapalooza as a single-site event in Chicago? Or the Philadelphia Eagles under the guidance of Nick Foles putting the New England Patriots in the Fucktomb? Or maybe if Inaugurals are your thing, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador's shadow presidency* in Mexico City, 2007?
*A true antecedent to El Jefe Maximo's March on Washington, 1/6/2021.
20 years ago my future was unwritten and I had no debt. Today my health and monetary situation is far worse as well as prospects for improvement.
So please shut the hell up.
It's OK for democrats to admit things aren't great. It's even ok to think that Biden and democrats in Congress are not helping. They need to do better. Manchin and Sinema have no answer. If we aren't clear about the problems then there will be no reason to change anything. If life is good, then just send Congress home and leave them there. Democrats can then run on the status quo because... life is good.
And the US military is incomplete it’s perfectly reasonable to fire all the generals!
https://responsiblestatecraft.org/2021/09/11/a-modest-proposal-fire-the-generals/
Allow me to suggest that senior U.S. military officers cannot absolve themselves of responsibility for the disappointments, disasters, and frustrations that have marked the ensuing two decades of our national life. The point is not to let civilian officials, beginning with the commander-in-chief, but also including the Congress, off the hook. It is rather to suggest that the nation’s mood and outlook might be rosier if the wars of choice that we inaugurated after 9/11 had ended in victory.
Our generals were expected to deliver those victories. As the abysmal outcome of the Afghanistan War reminds us, they came up short.
Allow me to suggest a corrective action: a purge.
Yes, please. A purge. I’d prefer a war crimes tribunal but that’s just a fantasy so… fire them. It’ll be fine.
This post is wilfully perverse, and will look downright deranged in a few decades.
Yes, the Titanic is sinking, but yesterday you couldn't listen to music playing on the decks and there's all kinds of free food down in the galley if you want to go down there.
Pre-Trump, these upbeat kinds of assessments could be found on conservative and libertarian websites. They are accurate, and it's a nice way to step back occasionally and realize that in many ways the world is truly getting better. They present a kind of positive, enthusiastic Reaganesque take on things. And left-liberals naturally hate that aspect.
Trump put a dismal shine on everything, and then formed a black hole that consumed all light, and these kinds of assessments disappeared. If Trumpism can ever be exorcised on the right, this point of view may return. This perspective was always an advantage over left-liberals when it comes to attracting voters. For many left-liberals, things are bleak, and the future is bleaker. Not too appealing.