Generations

50s: Constancy, GI Bill, Levittown, Sputnik, Korean War, Univac, DNA discovered, Joe McCarthy, Hungarian uprising, Montgomery bus boycott 60s: Kennedys shot, King shot, Woodstock, the Beatles, Watts riot and cities burn, Cuban missile crisis, Viet Nam, Bay of Pigs, first televised presidential debate, USSR had hydrogen bomb 70s: Kent State shootings, Watergate, Nixon and Agnew resign, Mars landing, Viet Nam ends, gay liberation movement 80s: CNN begins, Iranian hostages released, Falklands war, Sandra Day O’Connor first female on Supreme Court, Sally Ride first woman astronaut, Challenger explodes, Macintosh computer, Cold War ends with Reagan/Gorbachev, Berlin Wall falls, intense materialism and consumerism, MTV emerges 90s: LA riots, Oklahoma City bombing, Columbine shootings, Persian Gulf War, TWA flight 800 is blown up, relative peace and prosperity, end of USSR, rise of the Internet, Dow Jones clears 2,900 for first time 00s: Al-Qaeda attacks world trade center and Pentagon 9/11, Department of Homeland Security established, invasion of Iraq, Nancy Pelosi first woman Speaker, Michael Jackson dies, economic collapse, Y2K a flop, Barack Obama first black president immediately receives Nobel Peace Prize, Great Recession, Tesla launched 10s: Black Lives Matter, Brexit, occupy Wall Street, launch of the iPhone 4, Trump elected, natural disasters, Boston Marathon bombing, LGBTQ, Ebola, Prince dies We’ve come from a period of constancy to a period of continuing turmoil; from privacy to omnipresent publishing and exposure; from civility to rudeness and aggression; from support for the law to defund the police; and from respect for institutions to near-anarchy. This is not merely the changing of generations or progress or evolution of thought. It is a decline and declivity into amazing self-absorption, disdain for differing opinions, and really a wallowing in ignorance. Our primary institutions of the conveyance of values have all decayed: the schools, organized religion, the intact household, statesmanship. Is this a natural sign of the times, or more like the old trope that the first generation founds a business, the second modernizes and expands it, and the third, having no such hunger, runs it into the ground? The US is about 240 years old, which is one-thousandth of one present of the tenure of the dinosaurs on earth. They were erased by space junk, or they’d still be here. Will we be erased by junking our values?

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