bilby
Fair dinkum thinkum
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Both views are fact based. Since the industrial revolution, life has always been wonderful, and has always also been horrible.The interview starts with some background.
Saikat is too young to remember the 70s, as am I. But from what I read, it was not like this at all. There was the Vietnam War, Watergate, stagflation and Malaise. There was a lot of unrest and far-left groups like Black Panthers/Black Liberation Army and Weather Underground that did things like setting bombs.Back in the 1970s, America felt unstoppable. We had just put a man on the moon, built the interstate highway system, had decades of rising living standards and wages, and were including more and more people in society through the civil rights, gay rights, women’s rights, and other movements.
The problem of nostalgia is that people remember the wonderful part, compare it to today (where they are mostly focussed on the horrible part), and declare that everything has gone wrong (it hasn't), and that things were better in the past (on average, they weren't), and that we should strive to return to those days (we shouldn't).
The fact is that things generally have improved over time, albeit with local and/or short-term setbacks. We have less famine and hunger, less war, less disease and higher life expectancy; But our news reporting (unlike our history books) concentrates on problems we need to address (or at least to acknowledge), so we are bombarded with a constant barrage of death, war, famine, destruction and doom.
We need to be on our guard against these things, and we need to continue to strive to minimise them; But one of the most significant risks, against which we must be vigilant if we are to continue this progress, is the risk that this tendency to the pursuit of nostaligic claptrap will actually succeed, and that these misguided ideas will lead to policies that actually do take us back to the near past.
The past is another country, and it's a shithole country from which we are all refugees. We should resist being deported to it.