What happened to us?

[komondor]

I think the complaints are just due to the same thing which every generation does; thinking the country is going down the tubes.

And at some point, one generation will be correct. Nothing controversial, just simple inductive reasoning.

There is a cultural cliche that describes the following sentiment: "why, when I was a youngster, my grandparents thought Elvis was a moral degenerate and a bad influence on young people. Now we have gangsta rap and death metal that makes Elvis look like Mr. Rogers. And before Elvis we had morally questionable singers and novelists and sculptors and painters that looked like Mr. Rogers when compared to Elvis."

But there is a simple truth that enforces the concern in those generational voices, in spite of the mockery of the general argument itself. Things are getting worse, morally, as society becomes increasingly permissive.

It does add up to something. It adds up to greater rates of crime, poverty, divorce, illegitimate pregnancies, sexual diseases, drug use, and alcoholism.

And because of that, there are greater rates of depression, anxiety, suicide, addiction, loneliness, cynicism, and despair. The economy is faltering because people no longer know anything about perseverance, thrift, sacrifice, or restraint.

There is no moral restraint, and there is no fiscal restraint.

There is less conservatism and far more Progressivism, moral relativism, and lack of discipline.

 

[scotchleaf]

The successful effort to put racial politics ahead of class/economic politics. In the 50's (the time most conservatives love) the tax rate was 90+% on the top.

Also: Everyone who puts their own clients' and interests over the nations' like Lee Atwater, rush limbaugh, , carl rove, dick morris, etc

Atwater on the Southern Strategy (from wikipedea article on Lee Atwater)
As a member of the Reagan administration in 1981, Atwater gave an anonymous interview to Political Scientist Alexander P. Lamis. Part of this interview was printed in Lamis' book The Two-Party South, then reprinted in Southern Politics in the 1990s with Atwater's name revealed. Bob Herbert reported on the interview in the October 6, 2005 edition of the New York Times. Atwater talked about the GOP's Southern Strategy and Ronald Reagan's version of it:

Atwater: As to the whole Southern strategy that Harry Dent and others put together in 1968, opposition to the Voting Rights Act would have been a central part of keeping the South. Now [the new Southern Strategy of Ronald Reagan] doesn’t have to do that. All you have to do to keep the South is for Reagan to run in place on the issues he's campaigned on since 1964 and that's fiscal conservatism, balancing the budget, cut taxes, you know, the whole cluster.

Questioner: But the fact is, isn't it, that Reagan does get to the Wallace voter and to the racist side of the Wallace voter by doing away with legal services, by cutting down on food stamps?

Atwater: You start out in 1954 by saying, "N...r, N...r, N...r." By 1968 you can't say "N...r"—that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights and all that stuff. You're getting so abstract now [that] you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I'm not saying that. But I'm saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me—because obviously sitting around saying, "We want to cut this," is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than "N...r, N...r."[7]


In a February 1991 article for Life magazine, Atwater wrote:

My illness helped me to see that what was missing in society is what was missing in me: a little heart, a lot of brotherhood. The '80s were about acquiring — acquiring wealth, power, prestige. I know. I acquired more wealth, power, and prestige than most. But you can acquire all you want and still feel empty. What power wouldn't I trade for a little more time with my family? What price wouldn't I pay for an evening with friends? It took a deadly illness to put me eye to eye with that truth, but it is a truth that the country, caught up in its ruthless ambitions and moral decay, can learn on my dime. I don't know who will lead us through the '90s, but they must be made to speak to this spiritual vacuum at the heart of American society, this tumor of the soul.

 

[555]

The successful effort to put racial politics ahead of class/economic politics. In the 50's (the time most conservatives love) the tax rate was 90+% on the top.

I think it's more like.......

 

[MJF]

I think the biggest difference is that no one in charge can do anything anymore without someone in the media stoking a fire against it. You see it now with the way Fox news lambasts everything the Obama administration does, blaming everything on Obama himself, and you saw it with Bush as well. Frankly, while both of these presidents have bungled some things, I find it hard to believe that they both were personally responsible for every misstep during their administration. It gets to a point where we are all united against the one person who's supposed to be in charge of us, and that's no way to inspire confidence in our nation.

On top of that, our nation has been hoodwinked. We've been led to believe that everyone who's different than ourselves is bad and out to get us. We see it in immigration, what with the Mexican's stealing American's jobs (even though most Mexican laborers are working jobs that employers have a hard time filling with American help). We see it with the whole Affirmative Action issue. Most white males have never and will never feel the sting of affirmative action at work, but they've heard that their cousin's best friend's nephew's kindergarten teacher's veterinarian was affected by it, so they rally against it like the whole world's out to get them....Now I'm not a supporter of Affirmative Action, as I think it's a bandaid meant to fix a symptom rather than the underlying cause, but I think it's been rampantly overplayed. I think the wools been pulled over our eyes, and strawmen have been set up to keep us busy railing against fake issues and scared, as we're much more docile this way.

That's another issue, the fearmongering our country has become overcome with. Go turn on your tv....go ahead I'll wait....turn it to any news station and wait about five minutes....something disastrous is about to happen....ALL THE TIME! I had an Aunt who wouldn't eat hamburgers for years because she was afraid she was going to get mad cow, when barely 170 people IN THE WORLD have contracted the disease, and none of them was in the US. Or how about after 9/11 when the terror alert level would always suspiciously rise right before an election period. Fear makes us weak and docile, and allows people to take advantage of us. It's no secret that people statistically pay more attention to commercials if they're watching a sensationalistic news segment. Fear makes us more liable to seek comfort in those things which are familiar to us, thereby pushing us to consume, consume, consume, without stopping to think about what's actually going on around us.

That's my take on it all anyway....YMMV

 

[Mark J]

Thanks everyone for the input. So, I see a few themes in the responses.

• Moral/Cultural Relativism
• The 80's
• Lack of common enemy/goal that would unite us
• Technology
• Political Correctness
• Lack of Honor
• Consumerism
• Permissiveness

So a follow up question. Which of these are the causes, and which are the symptoms?

- Mark

 

[joe-bob]

I don't buy the whole "jobs Americans won't do" garbage. In fact, there was a study done by one of the pro-illegal immigration groups (I don't remember which one) that set out to prove that Americans wouldn't do certain jobs. They found no job descriptions where Americans were not a majority of the workforce. Not one.

Now, there are jobs Americans won't do for $2 an hour, and we need to punish the business owners who are doing that. The local NBC news station had one of their latin producers pretend he was illegal, and he got hired at a local car wash. They said they'd pay him minimum wage for 8 hours work each day. The first day, they made him work 12.5 hours, gave him $25 cash, and told him if he was late tomorrow, to not bother coming in. This is what needs to be stopped.

It angers me that people either deliberately, or through ignorance cannot distinguish between legal immigration and illegal immigration...the two are not the same at all.

I have not heard anyone say that they were against people coming here legally through the system. Not a single person. And yet, the dishonest media wants you to believe that people who oppose the flood of illegal workers and career criminals also oppose legal immigration. This is in no way the case.

 

[Jeff Clark]

Make the minimum wage for illegal immigrants $25/hour. If anyone pays illegal immigrants less than that make them liable for back wages, triple damages and court costs.

 

[Jeff Clark]

Looking at Mark J's list I see our biggest source of decline, we've all gotten too good at finger pointing, blaming other people (or peoples), and making excuses. My father's generation put us on the moon without half the advantages and technological head start we have. They didn't sweat the kind of small crap that most of you guys are talking about. They just dug in and did the job. They didn't even get paid all that much by modern standards and they lived in what we would now consider hovels. They didn't bitch about working for "the man" since they felt elevated by the challenge and boldness of their enterprise. They believed in a world that needed to be protected and that was on a road to improvement. We don't have as much hope and faith (in a general sense) than came with that era. To some degree a culture makes its own hope and faith. Our culture is waiting for it to be delivered.

 

[555]

Politics is part of the answer, but the question is bigger even than politics. This is an issue which pervades our entire nation and culture even beyond politics.

I agree the answer is bigger than politics But the politics in Family, Education, Religion, laws and taxes to control or make people do what they see fit is also part of it and this didn't happen over night.

I believe someone could write a book about this and still not cover all the bases.

And that ain't me. LOL

We are Harvesting in culture fields of today, from the Seeds that were planted yesterday.

Their numbers were small but their impact on what could be called the Largest Generation to date is Huge.

It Educated, set their values and they even gave them an acid test.
I think the Not So Silent Generation is over looked on the impact it had on Parenting the next Generation the Baby Boom.

As the 1960s approached, gnawing doubts began to emerge about life choices for the Silent Generation. Men who had bought the “work had and play by the rules” mentality began to question the mechanical sterile nature of their work lives. Oral contraceptive birth control hit the market in 1960 and Betty Friedan published “The Feminine Mystique in 1963 challenging contemporary ideas of femininity. Women began to question the social order. There were no states with “No-Fault Divorce” in 1969, but that number jumped to 45 by 1975. The divorce rate doubled in less than ten years and the bulk of the divorces were Silent Generation marriages. (Generations, 284) During the 1960s the mindset went from seeing children as a badge of honor to children as burden. Abortion also became legal in 1972.

The Silent Generation took the institutions created by the G.I.s as a given and sought to reform them. An explosion of activist organizations began to emerge in the late 1960s and 1970s. Scratch deep enough and you will usually find a Silent Generation person started them. The Silent Generation valued inclusion, acceptance, consensus and compromise but they sought these things in the confines of a G.I. defined world.

In the meantime, a new generation was emerging. The children of the Baby Boom “Prophet” Generation (born 1943-1960) began to enter college in 1960. They were raised to believe that they were children of destiny and could accomplish anything they put their minds to. Many of the generation shared the same distaste for the mechanical cold environment of the G.I. created world but they had no desire to reform it. They wanted revolution. They wanted to bring forth their own prophetic vision of the world. Silents were like a middle child sandwiched between an overbearing older sibling and a rebellious younger one. Always being the peacemaker, Silent Generation leaders often felt themselves pulled both ways and got a reputation for indecisiveness.

http://krusekronicle.typepad.com/kruse_kronicle/2005/11/silent_generati.html

Funny how the, Live for today, Do your own thing, Open minded, is the same Generation that lived in Freedom only to turn to Government to make others live as they see fit.

Since laws take away our choices as individuals and people feel less free in their choices/empowerment in life, people will seek to find control in their lives whether it be speeding down the highway to being rude to someone just to feel the power of pushing their buttons.

IMHO

 

[scotchleaf]

I think part of it is that, since women have been accepted into the workplace, now we need TWO incomes just to break even. That leads to kids being raised in daycare and thus the decline of education because, as everyone knows, it is the parents' involvement that is most important to a kid's learning.

Back in the 40's-60's a family could do well (or at least survive) on one blue collar salary.

 

[scotchleaf]

Making matters even worse is the fact that while the classes are moving farther apart -- with the middle class in real danger of entirely disappearing -- mobility across the classes has declined. The American Dream is defined by the promise of economic and social mobility -- but the American Reality proves just how elusive that dream has become. Indeed, Canada, Germany, Denmark, Norway, Finland, Sweden, and even the often-reviled France, have greater upward mobility than we do.

Here are the numbers:

•Almost 100 million Americans are in families that make less in real income than their parents did at their same age.
•The percentage of Americans born to parents in the bottom fifth of income who will climb to the top fifth as adults is now only seven percent.
•If you were born to wealthy parents but didn't go to college, you're more likely to be wealthy than if you did go to college but had poor parents.

 

[GWashington1732]

Making matters even worse is the fact that while the classes are moving farther apart -- with the middle class in real danger of entirely disappearing -- mobility across the classes has declined. The American Dream is defined by the promise of economic and social mobility -- but the American Reality proves just how elusive that dream has become. Indeed, Canada, Germany, Denmark, Norway, Finland, Sweden, and even the often-reviled France, have greater upward mobility than we do.

Here are the numbers:

•Almost 100 million Americans are in families that make less in real income than their parents did at their same age.
•The percentage of Americans born to parents in the bottom fifth of income who will climb to the top fifth as adults is now only seven percent.
•If you were born to wealthy parents but didn't go to college, you're more likely to be wealthy than if you did go to college but had poor parents.

Where are your numbers coming from?

 

[joe-bob]

•Almost 100 million Americans are in families that make less in real income than their parents did at their same age.

I don't know about the exact numbers, but for most of what used to be the middle class and blue collar families, this is exactly the case. People have seen their paychecks shrink or remain stagnant as decades have passed. In that time, the buying power of those incomes has shrunk every year. Imagine you made $20 an hour 30 or 40 years ago, and that trade still pays the same; how badly would you be sucking wind about now?

 

[Mark J]

Obvious by all the input, there is no easy answer to this question (if there was, I wouldn't have asked all of you! ). After reading all the responses, my take on it is that there was a fundamental shift from seeing the world outward to seeing it inward; from "how can I be part of a greater good and help others," to "how can I make myself happier at all costs." This attitude permeated the the 60's movement and definitely the 80's. Its core is consistent with the greed we see on Wall Street, higher divorce rates, focus on technology to entertain and form a barrier to the world (i.e., a cocoon of our own happiness), consumerism, etc. While its certainly is not the answer to everything I posed in the original post, it is what I've derived from the discussion. Thanks everyone, it's been very helpful!

- Mark