I was a kid in the 70s and people were far gloomier about the future than they are now, especially after I moved to the USA. Think of yourself as swimming in the open ocean: you can't feel the big waves (low frequency/long wavelength), just the chop you are trying to paddle through.
I think there are a lot of good things happening. There's finally progress on climate repair (tiny, but nonzero) which means we may have more time to fix things.
The last 40 years of entrenched bullshit is finally tottering due to its geriatric constituency, so I think there's a good chance for positive change on the horizon. And even the re-emergence of some of the worst people (let's just aggregate them into "the racist shitheads") I see as a positive sign: they were always around, but in the background. Now they have emerged because it's clear they are on the wrong side of history and they know that if they do nothing they will be greatly diminished.
There's no gleaming path to the future like you used to see in glossy utopian pictures in the 1970s. It will be bumpy. But overall I think the derivative is positive.
I'm not sure the USA will get its shit together, but it's only about 4% of the world's population.
I'm extraordinarily pessimistic about North America in general and think the future probably belongs to the rest of the world. I have spent most of the past decade away from that continent, and my optimistic prospects have shot way up as a result, but I look back at that region and just balk worse every time. Visiting back to the place and it's just toxic bullshit everywhere, I even got punched in the head over a jar of peanut butter in my last most negative encounter. It's crazy how the pettiest of issues just balloon into the most horrible kind of drama out in that culture. I wish it wasn't so, but it's been really quite a breath of fresh air dissociating as far as possible when the writing on the wall for things not socially improving was clear enough for me to get a plane ticket and do my best to not come back. It's a place where you could get shot for too much mayonnaise on a subway sandwich. [1]
If they want to get with the program they'll have to do something about a giant portion of the population being horrible people. I don't know what to say about solutions regarding that but then again I go as far as pretending not to speak English when I encounter people from there while abroad so I don't have to have any bullshit. If I can sus them out as being alright (No utterance of bigotry as I hear them talk in English is a big one, basic international etiquette like not interrupting people on an automatic basis over everyone else in the room is too), I might be OK with them but otherwise it's just way, way more trouble than it's worth to bother too hard on that when there's a giant world of people who don't act like that.
Thanks for pointing that out in such a manner, that's really nice of you - I hope you have a fantastic and prosperous life wherever you may be and don't have to put up with the kind of incredibly horrible (And without getting into detail, very personal) experiences I've had growing up on that continent versus what I've experienced almost everywhere else I've been.
I'd like to add something - a quote amusingly often misattributed to Sigmund Freud or William Gibson, although probably just from someone on Twitter [1] - "Before you diagnose yourself with depression or low self-esteem, first make sure that you are not, in fact, just surrounded by assholes."
> I was a kid in the 70s and people were far gloomier about the future than they are now
I was also a kid in the 70s and while it did seem pretty gloomy then, I think people are gloomier about the future now.
> And even the re-emergence of some of the worst people (let's just aggregate them into "the racist shitheads")
In the 70s there were racist shitheads, but they were pretty afraid to come out into the sunlight. Now they're just out in the open. I think I liked it better when they felt like they had to hide.
The other thing about the 70s compared to now: it felt like pretty much everyone was on the same page back then. There wasn't right-wing news and left-wing news, there was just news.
> In the 70s there were racist shitheads, but they were pretty afraid to come out into the sunlight. Now they're just out in the open. I think I liked it better when they felt like they had to hide.
Just out of curiosity, who are we talking about here? And are we sure it's not just because of more coverage? Lots of racist stuff that would have gone completely unnoticed in the 70s now makes national news.
There would be coverage of a KKK march through some town, for example, but it was always kind of a man-bites-dog kind of story. There'd be like 20 KKK'ers marching and hundreds of anit-KKK people on either side of the road. They were viewed as fringy.
Do you see in the news that these days KKK type orgs are marching around frequently and without massive opposition?
The last thing I can think of like that was Charlottesville 2017. That went pretty badly for the racists and AFAIK they failed to stage any meaningful follow-up.
I'm asking specifically about the racists. If we were talking about bad things in general, that would be at or near the top of my list along with climate change.
I'm sure many of the marchers happened to be racist but I'm not sure that can be characterized as the main point or driver of why they were there.
You can definitely make the case that a lot of Trump supporters are driven by reactionary racial attitudes, but it's not quite the same as open racial intimidation with white robes and burning crosses.
You forget the bombings and assassinations of the 60s and 70s. Nowadays even racists don’t like being called racist. The majority of the population at least want to be more accepting of people not like themselves (even though execution of this attitude is still pretty poor). As I say, the derivative is positive.
> There wasn't right-wing news and left-wing news, there was just news.
Perhaps in part due to the revocation of the FCC fairness doctrine [0] in 1987. I wasn't old enough to understand what news broadcasting was like _before_ this, and there are some criticisms of the doctrine, but what we have now _feels_ so much worse.
It's definitely related to the revocation of the fairness doctrine. Watch some newscasts from the 70s on YouTube [0] and compare to now - it's like night and day. Sure, the news was a lot more boring back then, but that's probably how it should be. Certainly sometimes there would be opinion, but it was clearly demarked as being the opinion part of the broadcast and it was towards the end of the broadcast. You could watch the 6PM news on ABC, NBC or CBS back in the 70s and they were each going to be covering pretty much the same news items in pretty much the same way.
I'm sorry to hear that about your goddaughter. That is terrible.
Separately from that, you can't post this sort of flamewar comment to HN. It's not what this site is for, and it destroys what it is for. We ban accounts that post like this, so please don't.
I think there are a lot of good things happening. There's finally progress on climate repair (tiny, but nonzero) which means we may have more time to fix things.
The last 40 years of entrenched bullshit is finally tottering due to its geriatric constituency, so I think there's a good chance for positive change on the horizon. And even the re-emergence of some of the worst people (let's just aggregate them into "the racist shitheads") I see as a positive sign: they were always around, but in the background. Now they have emerged because it's clear they are on the wrong side of history and they know that if they do nothing they will be greatly diminished.
There's no gleaming path to the future like you used to see in glossy utopian pictures in the 1970s. It will be bumpy. But overall I think the derivative is positive.
I'm not sure the USA will get its shit together, but it's only about 4% of the world's population.