I'm reading The End of October, if you could mash that with 1984 you'd have a good screenplay for this mess.
I'm not being political, just a casual observers thoughts. There's been a seismic shift in America in the last 70 years. You had the Greatest Generation that was able to pull together as a country and endure great sacrifices to defeat fascism and transform America into the largest superpower in the world. America can achieve practically anything if the collective weight of the country is working together. Watching the news now it seems that at least one third of the population only cares about themselves. All you hear when watching the news is my rights, my freedoms, my choices. These people are so selfish to refuse to make even the smallest sacrifice for their fellow man. And it's astounding to me that these people have the nerve to call themselves patriots. They cling to statues of America's enemies saying that it's not about racism but history while ignoring the history of a generation that actually came together and made America exceptional.
To borrow a line from trump... sad.
Yeah, I hear ya.
I sometimes wonder if the Greatest Generation will ever have any serious competition?
They went through the double hell of the depression and WW II and largely stuck together, and then the post war America had all the manufacturing work and jobs and an economic boom because the rest of the world was bombed out.
They weren't perfect, they didn't treat Japanese Americans fairly during the war, they didn't treat minorities farily especially down south, but they were the generation in power that passed the Civil Rights Act 20 years later. So they evolved and did the right things over time.
I see that seismic shift being a little shorter, more like maybe 30 or 40 years. Before that, I believe you could track steady improvement. After that, many things start to get worse, and a lot if it can be traced to the internet. A lot of it can be traced to job losses. The factory companies that survived modernized and modern equipment always cuts jobs. I worked summers for a company for four years, later became permanent. They invested in the company and it dropped the number of jobs there from 1800 to 500 over 44 years. Others moved off shore where it is cheaper to run sweat shops, but not very patriotic or moral. But money is money and companies are solely driven by it now. They used to have a degree of compassion. That is definitely long gone. And foreign companies destroyed in WWII rebuilt and began to compete.
Today you can't even get people to agree there's a problem with covid-19.
So historically, you have two sides of an issue. The two sides compromise and come up with a solution.
So we have a pandemic. There may be those too cautiously worried and think we're all going to get sick and there may be those who say, 'fuck it, it's not that bad' while they down play the infection and death tolls. I'm not sure there can accurately be two sides of a pandemic. It exists, people are dying.
And we really don't know how bad it's going to get because it's really in the hands of the people. And if they're going to not follow simple things like wearing masks in public, keep your hands clean and avoid large clusters of people it will continue to get worse. I see that as simple common ground mitigation efforts. But it's been politicized, like it or not, accept it or not.
As long as you have either common people or politicians saying things are under control while the infection curve soars almost vertically, then you have an obvious problem.
I guess it's everyone for themselves right now. How else could you define it?
The greatest generation never worked like that, they were much more of a team than we are now. It makes me appreciate them even more over time.
