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Can we all just stop for a second and appreciate what a crazy fucking time it is to be alive in this country?
Absolutely. And in so many way. I'm only in my 40s and I feel like I'm living in a vastly different world than the one I was born into.
The rate of change is unlike anything humans have ever had to cope with in our 2 million year history.
For almost all of human existence, there wasn't even a CONCEPT of progress... no sense that humanity was going anywhere. Your life was virtually identical to that of your great great great grandfather, and would be the same experience had by your great great great grandchild.
I remember a world of rotary phones, small towns with personalities before chains homogenized the world. I remember how the United States had a whole different personality before 9-11. I remember when Republicans had actual plans for governing (OBAMA'S affordable care act was basically a clone of Bob Dole's plan). I remember the world before the Internet, when malls were packed and buzzing, when shopping in stores felt magical and not like a ghost town.
I remember analog and even black and white TVs. I remember the first video games and PCs,b dial-up Internet, browsers before tabs were invented.
I remember when acid rain was there number one environmental concern, and how we actually accepted the science and made policy to fix it.
I remember the bugs.
I remember so many more bugs. The night alive with fireflies. Windshields plastered with splatters on the highway.
I remember paper maps! FM radio. Cassette adapters.
The world is so, so, so different. It changed so fast.
Republicans became a suicide cult.
The government stopped breaking up monopolies, and started bailing out too-big-to-fail banks.
The United States tortures people now. People never charged of a crimes were tortured at Guantanamo Bay.
I grew up in a home that my parents bought cheap. They had two cars. They took us on vacations every year. They saved up for retirement. My dad had a PhD. He did well.
I have a law degree. I will never own a home. I will never be able to afford even a single vacation. I will never be able to retire.
They rolled back Roe.
They staged an insurrection.
I've been working with GPT-4 night and day since it was released to the public. I'm 100 percent convinced that with a little supplementation, it is the first artificial GENERAL intelligence.
It can already create better writing and code than MOST of the human population.
Where will it be in 5 years? 10? 20?
It's going to be smarter, funnier, more creative, more thoughtful than all of us. In our lifetime. WHY, then, are we even HERE at that point? Why do we even exist?
These were questions for science fiction. For the future.
It's happening NOW. WE, of all humans in the span of history, are the ones who will see our species become obsolete.
So yeah. Let's take moment to realize how cosmically, historically insane it is to live in this moment.
Amen. And love your first point about how way back, the average person did not have a concept of progress in their day-to-day life.
I guess that didn’t really start to blow up until Newton laid the laws of physics down (along with calculus - what a guy) to allow for drastic scientific development. Once we had steam engines and the Industrial Revolution…change has become almost commonplace now.
I too remember paper maps…always in the glove box.
Having to remember phone numbers.
Encyclopedias
No cell phone and no internet.
Poor Leibniz, totally forgotten by history. Can you imagine inventing friggin calculus and nobody notices or cares? lol
It might surprise you to know that comment was written by chatgpt
Bugs. Yeah. That still creeps me out.
It's probably just the one of the first signs of ecological collapse due to climate change so nothing to worry about :(
Le sigh. Yup.
I was thinking about your comment and came back. I'm nearly 39 so a similar age.
First of all. What if you put your phone down, got off the internet and had a look around at your life and what is happening directly in your world. I'll bet it's not as chaotic as it feels when we see crazy headlines everywhere. You get up, chat with your family if you are lucky enough to live with someone, perhaps you go to work and interact with your coworkers or clients, hopefully the day isn't too stressful. Come home, think about what you will have for dinner and hope it doesn't make you too fat. Go to bed. You might squeeze in some time for hobbies, or visiting friends on the weekends.
Sure, housing is a massive problem right now, but financial bleakness isn't new - imagine how it felt to live through the great depression? I'm in Australia, but a couple of years ago we had my son's birthday at this nice lookout at the top of a hill. There was a plaque there that read that the road to the top of the hill was built by men during the depression in exchange for food to feed their families. The more kids you had the more hours you had to work. It was like 5 or more kids was a mandatory 12 hour day.
That would have felt bleak and like there was no way out.
Imagine getting caught up in world war 2? You would think the world had now really gone to shit. It was so traumatizing to the population here that every tiny town has a plaque of all the people who died from it. The names in the list are usually longer than the population of the town right now.
Then after the war, stuff like the threat of atomic war, nuclear winters and the entire earth dying because of a conflict escalation.
You described my childhood experience perfectly, but we might have just been very lucky and grew up in an optimistic decade full of rationality and scientific progress.
cant bone a robot. i don't think it'll be replacing us anytime soon
Not with that attitude
I'm confident Japan is working feverishly day and night to resolve this issue.
As someone who was in first grade when the towers went down I have to ask, how did the country's personality change from your view? What was it like before vs now?
You ever watch movies from the 90's to 2001? Notice how they are so damn light, jovial, inconsequential, happy, and just plain old fun? I'm talking American Pie, peak 90's humor, plus like Adam Sandler movies that were actually funny like Happy Gilmore and Billy Madison, Dumb and Dumber, Road Trip, Dude Where's My Car, things like that. They really capture the spirit of the 90's. There was this sense of optimism and joy that the cold war was over, technology is taking off, maybe we're about to enter this utopian future that Star Trek is always talking about.
Then boom, 9/11. Those first few days and weeks were something else. Unity like I'd never experienced before, it was incredible, absolutely dominated every conversation like nothing I've experienced since until Covid.
Then we started to fundamentally change in horrible ways. The Patriot act. Warrantless wiretapping. Torture. Illegal aggressive wars. The Bush Doctrine of preemptive first strikes. "You're either with us or you're against us." Free speech zones. Military WORSHIP where if you said a single fucking word against the military you are basically a treasonous bastard who should be shot. It was so fucking terrifying.
America is basically a textbook example of someone who went through a major trauma, had everyone's support almost universally, and then instead of getting therapy and working through it and resolving the issues that caused the trauma, it started spiraling out of control. Pushed away friends and allies, started fights it couldn't win, got more and more aggressive and closed minded. Radicalized.
It's a shame you didn't get to know America before 9/11. I was 19 on 9/11 and I barely got to know the country. It was far from perfect and everyone knew it, but the place we are at now is DIRECTLY related to 9/11 and I fucking hate it.
Going to copy-pasta my response to the other reply, but it rings true to your reply as well:
I could definitely see that, thanks. It's been a great frustration of my life to see "American the brave" regularly be "America the scared", and as I've gotten older I've increasingly found it (and many post 9-11 policies) ridiculous. I hope we can fix this in the coming decades, I wasn't old enough to speak up or understand what was going on then... I am now.
Yeah it's the cowardice that really pisses me off the most, that really gets to me. If we truly were so strong and proud we would've plugged the holes in airplane security quick and easy, sent in some special ops to capture Bin Laden, and most importantly, simply rebuild the towers exactly as they were before but updated and better, as a big fuck you to the terrorists. But instead..well, you know the rest.
To be fair, we did most of that, but we also added all this extra stuff that is totally unnecessary and made air travel a nightmare. Like honestly, is an airplane really that much bigger of a terrorist threat than hijacking a bus full of people, or a train and causing a head on derailment or something ala East Palestine?
I think we need to rethink a lot of post-9-11 changes, and I hope as more people in my generation get older they'll draw similar conclusions.
Freedom fries.
The clearest way I can illustrate this is that after Pearl Harbor was attacked, FDR have his famous speech which carried foremost the message: "we have nothing to fear but fear itself".
Contrast that to Bush's message, which was, essentially: Be afraid! Give up your liberty for (the illusion of) security!
For years it was: If you see something suspicious, call the cops! Let the government inspect you if you want to ride the subway! (But only at some stops. Terrorists, please don't walk a block down to the next station!). If you really want to help, spend money buying whatever! Take off your shoes to board a plane! Our government recommends you buy a bunch of hardware to protect your home against chemical weapons and dirty bombs!
Or: oh, hey, we invented a color-coded system to tell you how scared you should be all the time! (Pay no attention to the fact that we'll go on high sheet every time my administration comes under scrutiny for anything!)
Or: hey, we can label ANYONE we want as "ENEMY COMBATANTS" and they will have NO RIGHTS and we will torture them.
What changed was that Bush's administration used inflated fear of terrorism as a means of control. And if you voted against something in Congress... say, a war with Iraq (who had NOTHING TO DO with 9-11) you were branded as unpatriotic, and you got death threats.
Don't forget Freedom Fries, because those French pussies wouldn't join "George and Tony's Rootin' Tootin' Shoot 'Em Up Middle East Tour."
My god man I completely forgot about those stupid fucking terror alerts. "Today's terror alert level is Orange, just like it was yesterday and just it'll be tomorrow. Slightly elevated. Be afraid, but don't be too afraid to go to work, and make sure to vote for Bush again to protect you."
Remember leading up to the Iraq invasion, people were walking around unironically saying "I'd rather fight them over there than over here" as if Iraq could actually project power to the other side of the planet.
Fuck I hate this so much.
I think American citizens of Japanese descent would disagree with your good old days assessment of how Americans were treated by their own government during WW2. They certainly had their liberty and livelihoods taken from them. Furthermore people of color in general were still under the thumb of institutionalized racism that continues to this day. Do you believe they were better off back then too?
You're talking about oppression of minorities, and no one is going to argue that that was unconscionable. But I'm referring to the character if America as a whole. No part of our population was untouched by the darkness of the Bush administration.
I think FreeLikeGNU has a point here… the happier America as described has generally only been a reality for a subset of the population. Can we really suggest that is/was the ‘character [of] America’ as a whole?
The whole “MAGA” thing feels related to this point. Its like a large group of American’s feel the oppression, fear and lack of optimism and, in their anger and frustration, have embraced a view that what made America great was the division and exploitation rather than the optimism.
I’d argue causality — that they were purposefully led to that view by exploitative fuckwad Republican leadership that cared about Party more than the country and who used the fear, and exploited the crisis, to gain and maintain power and now don’t want to give it up. But we don’t really need to understand why or who led that change to also step back and be sad that the change happened.
Give it a few days; on the wrong instance you'll run into people who will
Pretty sure you said:
You don't think sending an entire ethnic group who are also American citizens to internment camps in the dessert forcing them to abandon their homes, work, friends, businesses is what you just described?
That's slightly different. (Very slightly). Those American citizens actually did have the right to fight their incarceration in court.
... It just so happens that the court absolutely shit the bed in a 6-3 ruling about their constitutionality
On the other hand, internment camps were effectively ended by the the supreme Court the next year.
Contrast that with "enemy combatants" who had NO ACCESS TO THE CIVILIAN COURT SYSTEM.
I don't see how "slightly different" could support the argument that things were effectively better at the time citizens were put into camps. The legal system supported a racist policy by "6-3 ruling about their constitutionality". Furthermore:
No. It was over two years before the order was suspended and the last of the camps shut down. The order was not officially terminated until 1976!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_9066
@flossdaily @Dark_Arc
All true.
The fear mongering the GOP party engages in now is unparealleled in its scope and voracity. All one has to do is mention limits on gun ownership to see the responses that start with "BUT I NEED PROTECTION!"
Not everyone is out to get you.
A lot of these gun nuts actually believe the only thing holding China back from invading us is the fact that we're heavily armed. Don't get me wrong, in the event of a foreign invasion I can see how a heavily armed population could deter or thwart the enemy. But Americans don't understand how insanely fucking overpowered the US military is. The ability to project power to the other side of the planet on MULTIPLE FRONTS is uniquely American, and it is the US military's principle objective since WWII. The only way to do that is with countless trillions of dollars which only the US has been willing and able to do for decades.
The idea of Russia, China, or literally anyone, packing hundreds of thousands or millions of troops into boats, sailing across the Atlantic or the Pacific, landing ground troops in our cities, taking out the air force, navy, coast guard, army, and national guard, to the point where friggin Bubba and his Meal Team 6 commandos need to grab their guns and start shooting commies in the streets...it would be funny if it weren't their core political ideology...
I feel like theres also some people who want guns so they could fight the government (like texas threatening to secede), which is equally hilarious.
I could definitely see that, thanks. It's been a great frustration of my life to see "American the brave" regularly be "America the scared", and as I've gotten older I've increasingly found it (and many post 9-11 policies) ridiculous. I hope we can fix this in the coming decades, I wasn't old enough to speak up or understand what was going on then... I am now.
Dude.....I'm 42 and that hits me in the feels. You couldn't have said it better
Preach!
I'm nearing 40 myself, I'm so depressed at what the future holds for my children.