I agree with your opening, but I'm conflicted on the rest. On the one hand the America of my youth was a safer place for kids. I remember people would sometimes leave their cars running while they ran into the grocery store and not really worry about anyone taking it. You waved at strangers on a Sunday drive, when you saw any. My mother could give me and a cousin money and a time to be back and send us running among the crowd and rides littering downtown Mobile during Mardi Gras and we'd come back safe and sound. I could ride my bicycle around the post office late into the summer evening without a milk carton appearance. You knew where your neighbors were going to be on Sunday.
You knew your neighbors.
So it's impossible for me to ignore how much more dangerous and evil the world feels by comparison, how different my approach with Jack is in the micro. That said, there were larger evils that society kept us insulated from, national ones and quieter ones that moved through our communities like snakes.
A part of me thinks it's numbers. You have a hundred people and a bad apple they contain him. You have a thousand and ten evil people it gets a bit harder. You have a million people and a mobile, much larger group and they start really impacting. And the permissiveness of the sixties has bled into a remarkable lack of cohesion on public morals and expectation. I mean just turn on your television. Two Broke Girls trades on filth that would have shocked my parents at ten o'clock. It's a prime-time, over the air hit.
You can't trade every sense of standard in the name of freedom without reaping a whirlwind of some sort. So while I'm (and in light of this perhaps strangely) optimistic about us as a people in the broad strokes I do think we're going to have to stand for something more than individual liberty at some point to survive ourselves. We're going to have to couple that with a real sense of responsibility, both to one another and the nation. If we can regroup around that much we'll be all right.
Humanity is always going to be a work in progress, because change is inevitable.
The 1960s had a huge effect on the culture of the United States, and on the culture of the world. And as would be expected, that effect had it's positive and it's negative sides. The positive side was that those hidden social and cultural "snakes" you referred to were brought out in the open, and a lot of people who would not have otherwise acknowledged them were forced to do so, and to end their participation in that persistent evil. The subjugation of women and people of color was finally brought to light in a way that made us deal with it. The warmongering of the wealthy elite, at the expense of the lives and limbs of everyone else was finally brought to light, and at least for that moment, put a stop to. The true meaning of freedom, and of democracy, was finally being explored and tested beyond just words and pledges, for all the world to see.
And these were good things, even though a great many of us hated them at the time, and some of us still do. And these great cultural steps forward naturally caused a lot of confusion, and resentment, and fear and anger. And those conditions can have some very negative consequences. As they open the door for our more selfish and violent inclinations. Individual freedom needs to be tempered with individual responsibility. But not everyone wanted to abide by this axiom. Equal rights also needs to be accompanied by an equal social responsibility. But again, not everyone wanted to abide by that axiom. And so selfishness began to run amok in a way that had not been so openly acceptable in the past. And we have not been willing to face that
in ourselves and correct it.
And it's been getting worse and worse for the last 50 years (and especially so since the 1980s). The nation is about to self-destruct under the weight of it all, and still, all we seem to be able to do is blame someone else for it. We're still not willing to look within ourselves, and see how we are participating in it. And so become willing to change.
The prosperity that brought us the ability to become idealists in the 1960s has been squandered by our inability to clarify and live up to our own ideals. And much of the progress we'd made then, is now being lost.
This is why I despair.
