doodle wrote: ↑Wed Oct 21, 2020 2:03 pm
How old are you, tortoise? Old enough I hope to understand that what we are seeing bubbling up in this country is nothing new throughout the sweep of history.
I'm not a vampire, so unfortunately I'm not old enough to have witnessed the "sweep of history" first-hand.
(Seriously, though, I'm 41. I'm assuming you're 38-40 since you refer to yourself as an "early millennial"?)
doodle wrote: ↑Wed Oct 21, 2020 2:03 pm
Nevertheless, despite my relatively privileged position I find myself in, i'm angry at increasing disparity in our country between the haves and have nots.
You seem to have an unusual fixation on the idea of economic inequality. Marxism, I guess. That's fine.
I don't doubt that economic inequality has played a part in many revolutions past. If people's living conditions deteriorate beyond a certain point, they will become restless and seek to overthrow those whom they perceive to be their oppressors.
The Occupy Wall Street movement definitely seemed to be rooted in the idea of economic inequality. The fact that big banks and corporations were bailed out while the average person was not was indeed outrageous, so I understood the motivation. I didn't agree with a lot of the Occupy protesters' actions, but I understood their motivation.
But it seems like the protests and riots we've been seeing in the U.S. this year aren't rooted in economic inequality. They began as a reaction to supposed racial discrimination by police, then gradually broadened into a protest of traditional American culture and institutions in general. As I pointed out in my previous post, most of the rioters aren't even poor or black. They're largely middle-class white teens and 20-somethings. They don't live in squalor. They live in Mom's basement eating food from her well-stocked fridge.
I see the root of the current unrest as
decadence, not economic inequality. America has become the victim of her own success. As the nation became increasingly successful, Americans gradually abandoned the core values that formed the foundation of that success. Those core values used to unify the diverse segments of our society, so as we abandoned them, friction and strife was the inevitable result. Americans no longer all agree on what's
most important in human life.