Comment by JKCalhoun
1 day ago
I can only say that it is worse now than at any other time I have lived (I say this at 61 years old, white guy, FWIW).
There's a complete lack of ... unity? Everything including the weather is now pigeon-holed into something political (and therefore "tribal"). Sock hops and the soda fountain were before my time, but I can speak for the 70's and say it was not this crazy.
Nut jobs like The John Birch Society (just to pick on one group of the era) were not given a global megaphone. Say what you want about newspapers, etc. but the "Fourth Estate" had to earn reader's trust, could not expect to just act to inflame the fringe elements of society.
I think what makes this time worse than the past (with respect to the idea that the past was bad too; see the sibling Jim Crow comment) is that in the present everyone is a target.
Was it Marshall McLuhan say something about man devolving into tribalism with the expansion of digital media? The individuation of the literate mind as opposed to the shared vision of the tribal, oral mind; new technology replacing one thing and simultaneously bringing back another from the past.
I want to say that the notion of unity was subsidized by a faith in liberal democracy. Even during the 60s and the 70s, my impression as that the language of activists back then, and consequently the conceptualization of their ideals, didn't stray far from a common dialect of the establishment, rooted in some kind of shared interpretation of democracy during that time. At least in a shared interpretation fundamentally, with conflict stemming from subsidiary ends.
Maybe what we're faced with now is the natural progression of the dissolution of a shared interpretation for social cohesion and whatever's meaningful behind why we want to bond with each other. So we tear away from each other in order to come back together. And it will never be exactly how it was before and maybe that's for the better in the end. Because what it took to get here wasn't great to begin with.
Yes because there was complete unity during Jim Crow, when there were laws against miscegenation, gay people weren’t allowed in the military, etc.
To be sure, there were times that were much worse. (I was a homophobe myself growing up ... until my best friend came out as gay after high school — then I had some actual growing up to do.)
But we're free to say this thing was better in the 70's without implying all things were. The internet has created a lot of problems that we did not have before is all I am really saying.