Remember When We Had Liberals?
I miss 'em.
posted by Winston Smith at
7:41 PM
Thursday, March 29, 2018
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2 Comments:
Mr. Egan claims that there is very little civics and government education in the K-12 curriculum anymore. He didn't cite his sources, and I'm too lazy to do the independent research necessary to verify his claims.
But, if true, I think that's a big problem.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/30/opinion/protests-democracy-teens.html?action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=opinion-c-col-right-region®ion=opinion-c-col-right-region&WT.nav=opinion-c-col-right-region
I think it fairly obvious that we are, as a society, suffering from a series of generations which have had to experience only minor risks and sacrifice little when compared with those generations which preceded them.
Among my friends, it is far more common than not to lack not necessarily the understanding of the value of the freedoms which are presently on society's chopping block, but the risks of their absence. It seems to me that many believe that an extension of the rules which were applied to them as children such that they should apply to them as adults is entirely sensible. (e.g. prohibitions on name calling and meanie-headed-ness).
There seems to be a general shift in generational focus between, say, the 1950s, and now, in a lot of ways that contribute to this. Watching 1950s movies and television and comparing it with today's is really quite amazing. Whereas the popular shows on television in the past were the likes of Paladin, the Rifleman, and Star Trek, the most popular shows now are reality television series. Where it's not reality TV, it's usually a set of shows which minimize the consequences of conflict and poor behavior. There are lengthy meditations on victims and their problems. Where men who stood for principles fundamental to civil society were celebrated in the past, my generation is far more used to spectacles made of trivial disagreements and representations of serious failures as honorable badges of survivors.
I know I can't write enough here to really substantiate those high-flying generalizations, and I know they sort of reek of the nostalgia of the good-old-days which may never really have happened, but I can say that my experience growing up in my generation and then intentionally seeking out the writings and works of the past decades for comparison results in a fairly unavoidable conclusion that the above is generally accurate.
A hugely influential character in my development was Captain Picard (and indeed the rest of the crew on that ship). They always faced situations with such gravitas. They frequently struggled with the consequences of their actions, and everything they did was important. They repeatedly struggled for the rule of reason and tried to simultaneously respect disagreement between literally alien civilizations and their own to the greatest extent they could morally allow. They were liberals in the most classic sense; they respected freedom second only to moral law.
When I compare that with the sort of abject garbage on TV now, and I see how strongly it relates to the entertainment for offer in the decades during and following which great societal struggles occurred for the sake of civilization, I do find it hard to believe that our generations now are, well, soft. We don't even discuss these sorts of ideas or obligations any longer. We have an extremely hard time even recognizing our problems correctly, and we don't expect our government to take any serious remedial action for them anyway. We seem to crave that inaction so that there remains something to point to which is more dysfunctional than we are, and therefore somewhat absolving of us.
We do not respect the government, nor do we respect the freedom it sustains. We take it for granted, and we have become so incompetent as to elect not FDR, not Eisenhower, not even LBJ or, god forbid, Nixon, but trump. We elect trump.
It ain't good. I worry that we're going to have to face a true disaster in order to muster up the strength we need to actually deserve, sustain, and make use of the peace we have.
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