As I got older and I reflected on all the grumpy old men waving at the clouds and complaining constantly about this-or-that being better in their days when I was a kid, I realized why.
Now I’m the old man and I avoid becoming bitter my reminding myself of the following truth:
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When you’re a kid, the world belongs to the grown-ups - your parents, adults of authority around you.
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When you reach teenage years, the world starts being yours: you’ve developed tastes for things people your age do and create. As you go through puberty, your identity is reinforced with things of your time, and other young people your age with which you do the same things. You all have a bright future in front of you.
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When you get out of puberty, hopefully you get our of school and start working: the world is fully yours. The trendy things in the world are things you find trendy too. Other people speak like you. You’re not a powerless kid and you’re not weaker old guy/gall yet. You’re fully part of it and it suits you. You may not like the world, but it’s yours. It shares your values and your values are what makes the world go round at that point in time . Your personality, your cultural identity and the cultural norms you respect, and your value system are fully developed, and a pure product of their time.
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And then they stay that way. But the world keeps evolving. Slowly but surely, the things you learned become deprecated. The things you like become old. The way you speak becomes strange to younger ears. The values you believe in no longer apply. The world slowly shifts beneath your feet, but it’s happening very slowly, year after year, until…
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You reach an age at which you’re very visibly and obviously out of sync with the world. Even you notice it at this point.
And here lies the trap: you can either reflect on how the world has changed and acknowledge that it’s not your world anymore, but it’s younger people’s now. People who are now the age you once were: it’s their turn to have a go at owning the world. You’re just in it for the ride.
Or you can take refuge in your old values, wallow in the old things you’ve liked for decades, and bitch and moan about the world going to shit. It’s not going to shit, but it feels that way to you. It’s easier to reject the world around you than admit it’s just not how you like it anymore, but it’s poisonous: it turns you into a bitter person everybody hates.
I choose to ignore the things I dislike - which, at this point, constitute a lot more of the world than the things I like from the past, from my youth. But I also choose to not pass judgment on them because they’re not from my world: they’re from today’s youth’s world, and I have no say in it.
If you’re old and angry, think about this. You might find some comfort in letting go.
The corollary of all this is: there is no better America in the past: the past simply seems rosier to older eyes. America has always been as great or as shit as you find it to be today.
The only problem I see with that is, even though I’m 40, the government and corporations are all still run by people older than me.
Hell, some of the folks in Congress are older than my parents.
And they’ve been running it since your parents were younger than you now. This has got to change, get our parents politicians out of office!
That’s the tragedy of government: rulers and lawmakers need to be old enough to be wise, but age also disconnects them from the needs of the world of today.
That is actually a good reason to have a wide variety of ages in government, so that there is a mix of those connected to the world today and those that have more wisdom.
That’s not a bad idea. But then you have to outlaw money in politics, because as soon as money is in the picture, it invariably favors rich old dudes, or people with connections that can only be formed over time.
In other words, nothing like this will happen in America in my grandchildren’s lifetime, let alone my children’s or mine.
That would help, but it isn’t just the money. Both Zohran Mamdani and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez were able to secure offices when they were right around 30 years old and both lacked solid support from their own party. Entrenched political parties are arguably an even bigger barrier to involving younger participation in government, not just because the parties control their own purse strings but because they resist up and coming candidates by treating office holders like they have tenure.
Yes, and Bernie Sanders is old as dirt yet a decent politician in touch with young people.
But they’re exceptions. We need AOCs and Mamdanis and Sanders as the norm in politics.
That’s the tragedy of government: rulers and lawmakers need to be old enough to be wise,
No, they don’t. Under a representative democracy (what most of The West is at this point) your “rulers” are not meant to be kings who duck into their study to decide what is most Just.
Their responsibility is to surround themselves with experts and to listen to them. Your representative should not need to study economics and computer science to understand what Google is. They just need to be able to understand a wikipedia level overview so that they can communicate with the scientists and economists on staff.
Similarly, your representative should not be sitting and deliberating on what is Right. They should instead be communicating with their constituents to do what is right by them. Which works better when they aren’t lugging around a canister of oxygen everywhere they go.
Which is why we tend to not use the word “rulers” anymore and instead focus on “civil servants”.
There IS an argument that the President/Prime Minister needs “wisdom” because they may need to make very quick decisions. But even that is mostly about listening to the domain experts who just happen to be generals in that case.
I think the meme is more about reflection about nationalism and its ties to history…
While for some countries like Hungary to be nationalistic is just funny (I am hungarian); while other countries say Germany, Britain explicitly outline their crimes against humanity in their education; but some countries who are not revolting dictatorships like Japan or US are explicitly proud of it… The last group is very concerning…
Welcome to conservatism!
Yeah OP is delusional. “Oh well I turned {{age}}, guess I’ll just stop caring about anything.”
This is drivel. Previous generations did have it easier than some recent ones.
Also, America sucks and always will.
This is drivel. Previous generations did have it easier than some recent ones.
Did I claim otherwise?
Of course we gen-Xers had it easier. And our boomer parents before us even more so. This is totally unrelated to what I said, which is that older folks tend to remember the world as better in the past than it truly was.
Also, America sucks and always will.
That is what I said. There is no better America in the past.
I can say with certainty that I had it way easier than my son.
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Back when they were fighting Nazis instead of being them.
We only caught German Nazis. In America, Nazis were in power or the heads of major corporations (See Henry Ford).
Shit, after operation paperclip it was pretty obvious that high level leadership didn’t have that much of an issue with Nazi ideology. It was true then, and it hasn’t become any less true as time has separated us from the atrocities they commited.
That nostalgia filter though…
We only caught German Nazis.
And when we caught them, we brought them back to Hunstville, Alabama to make ICBMs for Eisenhower. The fascism was fine, just so long as it was deployed to kill the real enemy - Communists.
Sadly there were Nazis in the US government before and during WW2.
The Dullas brothers are the prime examples. They spearheaded operation paperclip, which rescued Nazi scientists and moved them to the US.
The Dullas brothers are the reason why the US loved arming South American dictators from the 50s onward.
They also pulled a Japanese war criminal out of prison and put him in power in post war Japan.
You mean the days when black people weren’t allowed to ride the bus?
Indigenous and African Americans beg to differ.
before 1492
1491 and ¾.
Anyone who has seen The Village knows how this ends. It’s actually like The Jetsons out there. We were the North Koreans/Sentinelese all along.
No country has ever been great…especially the U.S. Its greatest period was probably 2015 just before the orange dust settled. Not great, but its greatest.
It probably wasn’t so bad and internationally disruptive pre-settlers.
Indigenous people being humans means there were violent conflicts between different cultures and groups within cultures like anywhere else in the world. It was relatively less violent than colonial occupation like how Europe was less violent than during the world wars.
oh, about 6,700 year ago
That’s an illusion.
America 7 millenia ago might have been empty enough of people to be peaceful (though I highly doubt that) but people died young of easily treatable diseases because they didn’t have vacc…
Nevermind…
and if i understand correctly there were no horses
1930s-1980s. So when the superrich were supertaxed. Remember 91% income tax in early 1960s?
How to show you’re white and don’t know and understand the experience of everyone else.
Others did a better job explaining that this period was far from perfect to a non-American that doesn’t always remember all the crucial caveats.
That was a pretty great time for middle class white people!
Well if we could try that era’s tax policies again, but without Jim crow this time, that would be a great starting point…
Yes, but that would require learning from history and we suck at that.
Middle class white males. Though granted, white women probably had it best out of all women.
There has not been a single year in American history that was great for all groups of Americans. This country was founded on the murder of natives and the exploitation of slaves/immigrants: that foundation has reverberated throughout our entire history. Government and corporate policy, often racist and sexist, works to maintain a permanent under class of exploited workers that provide cheap labor for the ruling class (e.g., Jim Crow, redlining, denial of reproductive rights, etc.). So while I wholeheartedly agree with taxing the rich, taxation alone did not prevent injustice in the 20th century.
Not to mention the devastation that America has inflicted on the developing world. Obvious examples include millions of civilian casualties during our wars in Asia and the Middle East, foreign resource extraction that provides us with cheap consumer good (e.g., banana republics in South America, slave mines in the Congo, etc.), as well as CIA operations that have been brazenly declassified (e.g., overthrowing presidents, installing dictators) because this country can’t even pretend to live up to its professed ideals. Any serious study of American history suggests this country has never been “great” in anything beside our wasteful military expenditure and our inexhaustible favoritism of the wealthy.
The wealthy game the system. This was always recognized, hence the high taxation.
It was probably pretty chill before a bunch of chodes came over and named it America.
Ehhhh, fwiw the Native American people had some fairly warlike cultures and long held beefs, we have documented genocides they did on each other.
Humans, generally, suck.
I think we’re more acutely aware of how much we suck because since the Internet took off and we should be able to communicate with anyone on the planet (within reason. Obviously madfrit tribes with spears in the jungle dont) we should have reached a new age of peace and enlightenment. Scientists can share ideas instantly so science goes through the roof, and commoners across borders can talk so we know eachother is being fed propaganda and nobody really wants to send their sons to die killing the other ones sons.
Unfortunately it somehow seems to have turned into a propaganda machine itself and gives us outlets to be awful to eachother with relative anonymity.
We could have had it all…
Viking settlements. Or the dutch?
the vikings called it “vinland”, and stayed there for a very short time before fucking off back to greenland/europe
their settlements amounted to a very glorified camping expeditionYessss. And i was making a joke about that
Apparently when white men ran it, women stayed in their place, gays stayed confirmed bachelors, and minorities stayed under the table.
“Great” is subjective. For them, america’s greatness came from the KKK lynching black people without repercussion before coming home, rape their wife and beat up their children
Get outta ma head Charles!
The moon landings were pretty great. Let’s just not mention the contributions made by all those ex-Nazis.
In the 1950s for white men, America was pretty great. For just about everyone else no one would say it was “great”. So when they say “Make America Great Again” they mean “Make America Suck Again For Everyone But White Men”.
June 6, 1944. Been downhill slide ever since
