Quote:
Originally Posted by Ghostvette
Re: Civil War/War of Northern Aggression we can save this discussion when we can sit down over an adult beverage or two.  Your points are valid and I understand them. It's difficult to look at past history without adding in what we've learned since then.
Re: Nature & politics; I agree. We had a strong nation, which enabled us to do what we did post WWII economically and in the rest of the world. But somewhere between Korea & Vietnam, we got lead astray. We got weak as a nation, post Vietnam, which lead to the November 1979 takeover of the US Embassy in Tehran and 65 American hostages. Then came the Reagan years and an increased respect for the US. National fortunes rise and fall like the tides, but right now we seem to be on the slippery slope to a place we might not be able to recover from. Instead of trying to unite the country, people 'in power' are doing everything they can to divide the nation by race, economic status and wealth. They are trying to cause a Civil War. Common sense is absent in Foggy Bottom and in the corporate board rooms. Common sense says that if you work outside/drive a truck, your exposure to others is very limited, but that level of 'common sense' has been removed. Over exposure to the talking heads on TV and corporate CEOs 'virtue signalling' is killing us as a nation.
/rant |
It’s a date.
I don’t drink so I’ll just have a coke but sounds good to me.
I will add one thing that some may find controversial re. Civil war: keeping the discussion strictly on states’ rights, I support the north crushing the south and formalizing the fact that federal law/government trumps state law/government, a loose confederation of member states cannot ever become a world power. In order to achieve economic and military etc supremacy, we needed to put that to bed.
I still think we have a strong nation, however, other world powers are catching up quickly. We enjoyed about 3 decades of a head start post wwII as the rest of the world had to rebuild etc and we were the primary source of raw materials and labor for that.
I think when folks say like you did that we are not as great as we used to be it stems from a few factors, some social and some economic.
Let’s look at economic first. If you look at our economy now, we are way bigger and more profitable and powerful than we were vs the 50’s or 60’s. But, the economy has transitioned from a manufacturing based one where there were plenty of good paying blue collar jobs (we have to give some credit to the organized labor unions here) into a more technology and service based economy.
/\ that has resulted in a lot of previous blue collar low to medium skilled jobs disappearing and being replaced with lower paying service sector jobs or higher paying white collar jobs. There are still plenty of high skilled manufacturing jobs out there but those aren’t enough to replace the millions of low and medium skilled jobs that are gone.
Those low and medium skilled jobs most of them will never come back, not bc of immigration or anything else social, but bc of AI and automation and tech advances that help boost a company bottom line.
Bottom line, the above changes have put pressure on the economic classes of people and many working class and middle class folks got squeezed into a lower economic class and some got squeezed up into upper middle class and wealthy class.
A separate discussion can be had where we can talk abou how anyone even someone working a couple part time minimum wage jobs can still retire after 40 years as a millionaire (investing duh). But our education system and our advertising/popular culture creates and encourages financial ignorance and greed w/o the patience to build wealth. //that’s another discussion