How bad are things?

[bilby]

 

[SimpleDon]

I don't believe that things are bad right now. Over my lifetime things have improved greatly. I am 65, born in 1950, at the start of the Korean War.

The biggest improvements have been the end of the cold war and its threat of nuclear war, the still growing environmental awareness and the slow if yet still incomplete gains in equality and civil rights for women and for racial, ethnic and sexual orientation minorities.

As always, conservatives believe that we have been changing too far and too fast and liberals believe that we haven't changed far enough and fast enough.

The major negative right now is movement conservatism with its fear of change and its embrace of income inequality, theocracy, class war, fantasy economics, science denial, anarchism, nativitism, homophobia, and racism. All with the apparent intent to bring on a second industrial gilded age and to rollback those gains in social justice made during my lifetime.

 

[4321lynx]

I don't believe that things are bad right now. Over my lifetime things have improved greatly. I am 65, born in 1950, at the start of the Korean War.

The biggest improvements have been the end of the cold war and its threat of nuclear war, the still growing environmental awareness and the slow if yet still incomplete gains in equality and civil rights for women and for racial, ethnic and sexual orientation minorities.

As always, conservatives believe that we have been changing too far and too fast and liberals believe that we haven't changed far enough and fast enough.

The major negative right now is movement conservatism with its fear of change and its embrace of income inequality, theocracy, class war, fantasy economics, science denial, anarchism, nativitism, homophobia, and racism. All with the apparent intent to bring on a second industrial gilded age and to rollback those gains in social justice made during my lifetime.

Agreed. In other words the negative is the Republicans' American Fascism and its intention to globalize itself whilst setting up an exclusive "Fortress USA".

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

Things are great.

• Technology is leaps and bounds from where it was when I was a kid.
• Interest rates are so low that owning a home is easier than it has ever been (kind of).
• Health care has never been better!
• Standard of living is good.

Things not so good.

• Despite being in the information age, people are as misinformed as ever.
• Interest rates are so low, can't save money in a savings account and earn interest worth a darn.
• Health care continues to eat more and more of the family budget... and that is the premiums, not the actual cost of the care.
• My parents won't be able to afford a nursing home.