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It always end s up in the middle, but it swings from one extreme to the other first..
We are in the "swing" phase..
Every 35-40 years or so, America gets its panties in a wad..We do not seem to have a longterm memory. We have a unique situation with our media though, that has never happened before, and it's anyone's guess..
Until quite recently, people got their news from their local paper or their local TV station.. Cable news and the consolidation of the newspapers changed everything. If you look at a paper in Sioux Falls, the exact same stories will be in it, as the paper in Chattanooga .. The "local" sections get smaller and smaller, and the news gets more homogenized.. People "learn" what the people who own the radio stations, newspapers,and TV networks want them to learn.. In school, less and less time is actually spent on learning, as more time is spent of training for "the test"..
Jobs were not as exciting in the past (kids tended to do what their parents did) , as they are now, BUT the last 30 years has brought to fruition, what a lot of us feared back then.. Machines that were "sold" to the worker as helpmates, have either taken over their jobs, or allowed those jobs to be digitized and sent across the world..
When it was the foundry workers, and manual laborers who lost their livelihood back in the 60's, people did not raise a ruckus, because they were "low end" workers.. Then the steelworkers and auto workers lost a lot of their jobs. Those were "family-supporting" jobs, and unless the worker was at the beginning of his career, he was pretty much screwed. The kids of those workers saw that they needed to be well educated to avoid the pitfalls that "Dad & Grandpa" had fallen into, so most kids trained for white collar jobs.. Those were jobs of the "future"..until the "bosses" figured a way to eliminate even those jobs.. What we have ended up with is a "perpetual student" who works various part-time jobs with no benefits, because he is on a treadmill of job outsourcing.. He's told that he needs to retrain, but by the time he's paid for and retrained himself, there are 500 applicants for 20 jobs.
I seriously worry about the ones who are in their 30's now. They have overextended themselves for the $50,000 cars and the $500,000 houses, and there has to be a "correction" coming.. There always is..
The Depression was a correction for the profligate years that came before.. It took WWII and a very gutsy president to bring us out of that free fall.
The payoff was a prosperous and calm 50's & early 60's..
The cold war spending and the arms race of the 60's and the social upheaval, all coincided with the largest group of people entering the workforce ..ever......The kettle boiled over ... The 70's were not great at all..The staggering recessions..one after the other ,high inflation,and wage and price freezes made it difficult for people of modest means to keep up.. That was the real end of "upward mobility".. The 70's ushered in the era of treading water..
The phony prosperity that people thought we had was a result of borrowed money, and all through the 80's the administrations kept those plates spinning, but we all know the crushing debt we had when Clinton came in..
The end result of all the scrambling was that for 25 years, ordinary people were just too busy trying to keep their heads above water, that most did not notice that they were actually falling behind..The gap between rich and poor only gets wider, and the ones in charge only get blinder to the troubles of the common man..
I don't know what I would do if I were a twentysomething, just starting out.. When I was that age there was a heady optimism in the air.. I do not sense that now.. It's oppressive right now..
Globalization only works as long as there are compliant people willing to go along.. More and more there is resistance.. There are more and more people who realize that if the goal of globalization is the lowest common denominator, it will not work.. If the third world is to rise, it must not appear to have risen, only because the we have come down to meet it.
There will be a tipping point though... there always is.. We were sure that the whole world would be blown to bits during the missile crisis...but it wasn't..
The only advice I can offer to the young ones, is that it's never quite as bad as you think it is, it can always get worse than it is, but chances are, it will stay the same or get better. Evil can be in charge just so long, before people say.."No more"..
Consider too, that the boomers (my generation) , as huge as we are, will be gone in a flash too.. We arrived in a flurry, and we will depart the same way... Between 2025 and 2040, most if us will be gone.The younger population that will result will be free finally to do things their way...just like every group before has wanted..
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