Society has problems that need fixing.
The people we ostensibly put in charge of fixing society’s problems have a great deal of power to enact their proposed solutions.
The perceived problems faced by society, which it’s assumed need to be addressed by those in charge, include such items as: the unjustified claiming of “free money” by those who haven’t proved themselves to deserve it; long-term unemployment; and criminal behaviour by juveniles.
Popular salves for these maladies include, respectively: imposing benefit sanctions for transparently idiotic reasons; forced placement on full-time, unpaid workfare schemes; and solitary confinement of children, a practice widely regarded as torture.
I talk semi-regularly about aspects of our society that I truly believe will be looked back on with horror, disgust, and bewilderment in a century or so, and I want to explore that in some more depth.
Even people who haven’t experienced it directly will be familiar with the racist grandparents trope. People who grew up in a different era often don’t have the same sensibilities to certain issues that we do today, and maybe they can’t be expected to. It doesn’t make them bad people, but they were raised with a certain set of attitudes being strongly normalised, and it’s not always easy to see, decades later, why the way you’ve always acted is suddenly so offensive to people, or so drastically needs altering.
It can be hard to articulate to someone behind the curve just why it’s important to adapt like this. “Just don’t be racist” doesn’t seem like it should need spelling out; and yet if something was “just the way things were” seventy years ago, it may not be obvious that the world has changed for the better.
I’d be amazed if there weren’t things that my generation’s grandkids end up being impatient for me and my peers to adapt to, but which we struggle embarrassingly with. The thing I particularly imagine them wondering about us is:
Was that really the best you could do?
Seriously?
All that technology and productivity and abundance and capacity to do amazing things together, and you couldn’t find any better way to induce better behaviour in kids, or deal with supposed “freeloading”, without shitting all over thousands of other people who were just trying to get by?
You really didn’t have any better ideas for how to help lift up the lowest among you, and give everyone a chance to thrive?
There was really no interest in picking a military strategy that didn’t involve the useless mass murder of random foreign civilians?
Were you guys actually, really, honestly trying as hard as you can to not totally fuck everything?
Really, though?
When they get around to asking us that, I’m not sure what our answer is going to be.
But maybe I’m just projecting, because I’ve already been asking it for so long myself.
Cool down a little. You don’t need foul language to get your point across, but it does show the intensity of your emotions. That said…
I’m from the older generation and have dealt with the things you have mentioned, but not in the way you think. For instance, racism… Very few people I knew were racists. Sure we told off color jokes, but very few of us really believed that other races were less than ourselves. I’m white. From my perspective, it was the blacks that were racists. From the blacks perspective, it was the whites that were racists. Both races feared each other and expected the worse for the other. It wasn’t racism that separated us, it was this fear and belief. This was not the case all over the nation, especially the south. There were other things that divided us and that was the way we spoke our words and our different social habits.
Even today, these differences still plague us. If a black person acts and speaks like a white person, they are treated equally (in most situations), but if the mannerisms and speech is different, they are treated differently. The point I am trying to make is that racism wasn’t so much relative to skin color, but more so, cultural. I am so happy to see blacks succeeding in today’s world and bridging that cultural gap.
I see a great many problems in today’s world too. The thing you need to consider is that up to about a hundred years ago, they world changed more slowly. Today, it changes rapidly and it takes time to adjust. Mistakes are constantly being made, in the name of good intentions. The world is growing smaller due to technology and all these different cultures are having to deal with all the others. We are in a time of great transition as a world of people.
As for war, you can thank the politicians for that. They have kept it alive throughout mankind’s entire existence and there seems to be no abatement of their insanity.
Your generation is not much different than ours. I do believe that you believe that to be true, but from what I see, it’s not. In fact, in many ways, your generation is worse than ours. It seems that money is your metric for success rather than your accomplishments. I’m being general here and what I said doesn’t apply to everyone.
In any case, our nation has gotten to be a worse place to live than it was in my youth. We never locked our doors and walked the streets without fear. Now we fear bad people and we fear the cops. At night we lock our doors and wouldn’t even consider going for a moonlit walk.
There is no doubt in my mind that you can find things about my generation and the world we lived in in the past to condemn us for with all full justification, but don’t think for a minute that things are better today.
That’s my 2 cents…
Hmmm, I wish I could reword some of what I said…