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You've never had smallpox.
You probably have never been hungry. Famine used to be a thing that just happened every ten years or so.
You've probably always had ready access to drinking water.
There's always been wars, people doing terrible things. Slavery and genocide are pretty much par for the course whatever the ethnicity/region.
By most metrics this is the safest time to be alive.
But ya, shits pretty fucked still. So I say we all wake up tomorrow and try and do a little better.
Didn't know I needed some good old fashioned pessimism to ground me today. Thanks!
Always has been, the big difference is it wasn't streamed straight into your eyes in real time
Yep, only in my 50s but this is correct. All the shit under Reagan, Nixon etc, decades of meddling in the middle east before that. A century of oppressing South America. All the labor struggles. It's like the increase in the diagnosed cases of autism. The number of cases didn't increase. Only our awareness.
Yep, you had to get out of bed, and walk a few miles, if you wanted to see public torture and humiliation of others.
But executions and all that were public events. Not behind closed doors like today.
My dad regaled me with tales of the 60s/70s once. The JFK assassination, Vietnam war, the gas crisis, hyper inflation, 20% mortgage rates.
The older you get, you realize everything isn’t a world ending crisis. I think our 24/7 outrage-based media is responsible for a lot of FUD.
The world was always fucked up, but we had a sense it was improving. That's what has changed, majorly. We started having the feeling that as bad as it is, it is only going to get worse.
YES. But a big chunk of people have been sheltered from that fact.
That’s why we have people: wanting civil war, because they’ve never had to personally suffer the loss, privations, and terror of a real war. Are anti-vax, because they haven’t had plagues of smallpox, the flu, or polio kill their kids, friends, and relatives. Pro-authoritarian, because they’ve never lived under a series of shitty power grifters and a corruption-based economy where absolutely nobody does well except the richest. Anti-social programs, because they’ve never faced homelessness or a disability.
There are so many things that people have had the luxury of avoiding that they’ve forgotten how shitty the world is. Spoiled children, they are.
Im 59, it was just easier to plead ignorance back then. Hell, beating gays was seen as ok, raping your wife was quite legal, fucking kids was mostly ok, racism was seen as humour, my mother took up teaching as she said the other career she considered forced you to leave if you got married (bank teller).
We slaughtered people all over the place with impunity, overthrew governments. Same as today really.
My mistake? I assumed it would get much better when my cohort of Gen X came through, same as young millennials think today. It's not worse, it's just we're more aware.
I assumed it would get much better when my cohort of Gen X came through, same as young millennials think today.
TBF the same generation has been in power for 30-40 years now. If the torch had actually been passed it would be a different timeline.
No, no it was not.
Example: when they found out what caused the hole in the ozone layer, they fixed it.
If we found out now, people would say that you can't trust Big Academia or Big Science and nothing would be done. And don't get me started on vaccinations.
We're sliding rapidly backwards.
People who say it isn't are just too lazy to do anything.
Stopping climate change is ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE harder than protecting the ozone layer. Protecting ozone requires switching the chemicals we used in refrigerants and propellants to other, viable alternatives. That affected products worth, generously, maybe 1% of GDP?
Stopping climate changing the vast majority of the vehicles on the planet, along with the majority of our electrical power plants. It also necessitates stopping deforestation and overhauling a wide number of industrial processes, including for basic materials like steel and concrete. And that's not even getting into methane emissions from livestock.
All of these things add up to a massive chunk of the planets GDP. It's an extremely heavy lift, and it's not fair to say that the world has gotten worse because we're struggling more with climate change than the ozone hole.
I feel @starlinguk@lemmy.world was saying more than that. I don't recall any serious studies or news articles suggesting the ozone hole was a hoax or that debunking a human cause. Although it was kinda an aside but the anti vaxine thing he points to. I mean one of the most effective medical interventions since soap and sterilization has people acting like its some sort of evil witchcraft that will actually harm you despite the clear evidence both clinical and personal to its effectiveness.
I don't know of any for the ozone hole specifically, but you can look to the fight over cigarettes to see the same science-denying approach during the 50s and beyond. That was literally the blueprint for climate change denial by the fossil fuel industry in later decades.
No one could see the ozone hole. We had to believe science and everyone did.
meanwhile climate change is not just easier to understand, but becoming apparent in everyday life. There’s been an overwhelming consensus in science for half a century. How do people still doubt? Or what kind of hatred could make you actively resist changes to mitigate it?
I'm 57 in the US and up until the last ten years I always thought that things would get better in my lifetime and that ultimately my country would eventually choose the right financial and moral paths. Now I not only don't believe that will happen in my lifetime but I doubt if this nation will bounce back in my kid's lifetime, if ever.
Same age, same thoughts. The past was violent & sucky but it really felt like we were making progress, things were getting better. Some things have, there's a lot less violence where I live, and more to do, the city has progressed.
Honestly I think the slide started after Bush vs Gore, and very often wish I had been in the other timeline, where the votes got counted before he conceded, Gore seemed conceited but smart, geeky and took good ideas seriously.
I've just finished reading a very detailed book on 13-16 century renaissance history and yes, always fucked. Though less dark ages than you'd think and more fucked politics, same as now.
Plus we only really know the history of rich people up until very recently, so no telling how fucked the poors were.
We didn't start the fire was written for this exact reason. Billy Joel was talking to someone 20 years younger than him who said that when he was 20 more stuff had happened than when Billy Joel was 20, so he just started listing all the stuff that had happened before he was 20 and then expanded it into the song.
OP keep this in mind.
During and 18 month period in the early 1970s there was an average of five domestic terrorist bombings in the US every day. Think about that.. five a day was the average.
It used to be a lot worse for the vast majority
The world has always been a shithole. The manner of shittiness has changed and also depends largely on location.
Not an old person. But so to put into perspective:
My maternal grandmother was born in war-torn China after the japanese imperilists wrecked our country. Food was not even a guarantee... farming sucked...
My parents were born during the cultural revolution... the way they described stuff... all they had to eat was 番薯 (sweet potatoes?)... they say my generation had it better off...
I remember rations were said to be a common thing...
By my era, I had stable access to food. I remember being so picky and they scold me for me... "back in my day... all we had to eat was..."
I wanted more things to play with... its responded with... "back in my day... all we had to play with is..." (don't remember the answer but they played with like rocks or sticks or strings or stuff like that)
Literally... all the food would've been a luxury in their era...
So like... in a way... westerners having access to food is already not bad...
I mean y'all are not being invaded by imperial japanese...
y'all not being bombed by russians in Ukraine....
y'all not being bombed by israel in Gaza
so...
(I'm not saying you should accept status quo, just trying to think positively by looking into how bad it could get...)
-From an American Citizen originally born in China in 2002
Edit: I also wanna mention the problem with people who grow up under these conditions... they had to deal with so much "real issues" that the whole topic of mental health is never a thing to them... "just get over it" as my parents say...
UGH WTF...
So yea... the west have mental health acceptance... so consider yourselves lucky...
This is actually one of the best times in human history.
Not anymore. Conflict around the world has statistically shot way up. There's also a significant increase in political polarisation around the world.
My take is that everything was worse back in the day, except for two things: climate change due to an unprecedented rate of global warming, and the ability to bomb ourselves out of existence with nuclear weapons, which simply did not exist before 1945. I worry about the first more than the second.
Well, there are two songs which I think answer your question:
And
Besuchen sie Europa, solange es noch steht
Which is a song about visiting Europe before it will be destroyed by the then assumed imminent nuclear war.
No, the 80s and 90s were fantastic. I would go back if I could. I thought it was bad that there was wars and corruption but I had the feeling that leaders tried to do the right thing. Maybe they didnt but I felt like they did. Not today.
The world is just as fucked up as it ever was. The only difference now is that every fucked-up thing that ever happens anywhere is getting pushed to your always-on doomscroll device in real time with people attaching their mostly ignorant opinions to it.
This is where the "touch grass" advice comes into play. In broad terms, the real world is not nearly the hellhole social media portrays it to be.
Generally, things were always fucked up. However, two major changes between this generation and previous ones:
Leaders were generally portrayed as being more competent than now. Even leaders who were considered dumb at the time kept themselves to a far higher standard than now.
The media landscape is more fractured now than before. It was common for television shows to be seen by a third of the country. It made things more uniform culturally. A lot of that is gone
People who only go as far back as the 60s/70s, truly ignore everything that has happened prior. Things for human society and the world didn't start getting bad on those decades, that's only recent memory to those born from or grew up through.
The world didn't start getting fucked up until humans developed here the day they evolved.
In ancient history;
You could be tried and killed by just simply being allegedly accused of being a witch. The Salem Witch Trials demonstrated that happened in the early 1690s. Accusations entirely arbitrary and subjective, I may add.
5 Million people got killed because of one single messenger, the wrong one, got killed. This was through the Khwarazmian Empire dated back in 1077 - 1231.
Then we know about everything the Egyptians did and how they got the pyramids built and all. Slavery was rampant in the ancient past, nothing just built itself, you know.
So yes, the world was always fucked up long before the 1960s and 1970s. You would not last a day in the past, where all developed concepts and ideas were nothing but just thoughts of the mind and just about anyone could decide to kill you just because they can.
Honestly, after your reading youre examples, it seems like things are worse today.
25 people were killed in the Salem witch trials. That is about the same number of unarmed black people killed by police every year.
And in your other example, 5 million people were killed in 154 years. In the post 9/11 Middle East wars, there were about 1 million people killed in 20 years. There were 100,000+ civilian deaths in Iraq which was the result of misleading WMD lies. So a lot of death from a "wrong" messenger in modern days too.
It's always been this way, just the internet has made global awareness easier
Well, as an American, I can only speak for my lifetime...
Late 60s/Early 70s - Vietnam/Nixon - Pretty fucked up.
Late 70s - Iran hostage crisis - Fucked up.
80s - Reagan/Bush - Iran/Contra - Recession - Iraq War I - Fucked up.
90s - Clinton era was pretty good. Big scandal was a blowjob. People actively talking about blowjobs all the time.
2000s - Bush II, 9/11, Iraq War II, Abu Ghraib, 2008 financial crash - VERY fucked up.
Late 2000s - Obama - Not awful. He should have ended Bush's drone program, but not awful.
2017-2020 - Trump. Covid. 1,000,000 dead Americans. INCREDIBLY fucked up.
Early 2020s - Biden - Fucked up inflation. Covid weirdness.
Now? (gestures)
The creation of the universe was a mistake. It's been downhill since the big bang.
This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.
—Douglas Adams
I'm not that old...
But you're confusing reality for perception.
The world's been fucked up, it's just people can see it from their phones when they used to not even hear about it
Being aware of issues doesn't make them worse, just means we have a shot of fixing them.
