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Surly Olds (and Super Olds...looking at you Army Brat), Is the current state of the country the most divided in your lifetime?


Patricio Swayze

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Shit that was going down late 60s to mid-ish 70s was unreal.
Bombings in public places were so common for a while they weren’t even headline news.
FALN
SLA
BLA
Weathermen.
A lot of these organizations were comprised of mid to upper class young folks.

“Eco Terrorism” was getting ramped up. Greenpeace an Earth First were getting into confrontation and sabotage. Environmental Life Force was using explosives and arson to get their message across.

It was the golden age of airplane hijacking. So much so that it was just cost of doing business to the airlines. They even included charts of the Caribbean for pilots to make it faster/easier in case the got hijacked.

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Basically we have a few political shitheads in a radicalized party that need to be voted out of office and the problems will solve themselves. There is a metric fuckton of legislation that is passed by the house that just needs voted on in the senate that will fix a lot of issues we are seeing, the problem is they aren't voting. The reason they aren't voting is because of a radicalized party who has people on record trying to subvert the way the government should work, including Bill Barr who is very on-record stating his belief in Unitary Executive Theory. 

The problem is we are stuck in a time before the internet and before the population explosion happened in centralized (read: Urban and suburban areas). We are no longer even relatively an agrarian society and the majority of representation should reflect the industries that we are in (entertainment, technology, industry, etc) - it's also not hard to fucking help "farmers and ranchers" when the rest of the stuff works right. People care about food supply quite a bit and destructive legislation like the ethanol corn subsidy are more to blame than rational policy.

I can see myself running for office sometime in the near future, but the platform I will have is that it will all be driven through robo-vote. If the majority of the constituency doesn't vote then the vote is abstained on any legislation. If the constituency votes for something then the office votes for it etc. Representative democracy at a large scale wouldn't necessarily work, but until we get elected officials who actually represent their constituencies best interest instead of their donors or personal interest we will continue down the path of radicalization. 

The solution to this problem is to get the people who don't care about anything to fucking vote.  

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2 hours ago, Fudge Nuggets said:

I'll be 50 in a little over a week so I missed the Civil Rights division.  But during my lifetime this is the most divided I've seen the country since the early 1980's great debate over "Tastes great / Less filling".  Thankfully the nation survived those turbulent times.

 

 

 

Somehow we weathered even the worst of storms in the early 80s.

 

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2 hours ago, bad_teammate said:

This ain't jack shit compared to the Civil Rights Era and even Vietnam.

This shit is invisible in the real world if you get offline or stop looking at the TV. The protests are tiny/non-existent.

This is downtown Austin yesterday in over 100 degree heat - a mobilized crowd in the thousands only a few hours after the decision. It ain't inconsequential.

 

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But life goes on…… as I posted this elsewhere yesterday:

Neighbors behind us two doors down must be out of town because there was a really noisy kegger going on after 10:30 to midnight last night. Quite a ruckus when the Wilco sheriff’s deputies raided the place. Kids panicked and scattered like cockroaches, several of them climbing & vaulting over my back wood privacy fence and running through the side yards gates. Next door too.

I dunno who called it in, but most of the surrounding houses heard it all, and the deputies Spent at least another hour until 1am looking all over with their flashlights. I went out and showed one of them the broken fence picket where some kid vaulted over, but wasn’t quite as athletic as the others. Texas track Coach Floreal doesn’t need to recruit him. Lol
The host must’ve been near the bottom of his class if he didn’t know the proper way to run a kegger without attracting attention to ruin it.
we didn’t get back to sleep until after 2am.

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16 minutes ago, bolverk said:

This is downtown Austin yesterday in over 100 degree heat - a mobilized crowd in the thousands only a few hours after the decision. It ain't inconsequential.

 

I absolutely believe this could blow up into a truly serious social moment in America. Abortion actually impacts the lives of white voters; women specifically.

 

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3 minutes ago, bad_teammate said:

I absolutely believe this could blow up into a truly serious social moment in America. Abortion actually impacts the lives of white voters; women specifically.

 

This, and only the truly stupid/MAGAts don't see what this means for the big picture going forward.

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2 minutes ago, bad_teammate said:

I absolutely believe this could blow up into a truly serious social moment in America. Abortion actually impacts the lives of white voters; women specifically.

 

If I recall correctly, you live in Houston. To get your bearings, this was in front of the federal courthouse next to Republic Square Park. The place is built like a fortress (post 9/11, yo). I'm actually surprised they were let onto the steps to lead a protest from.

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13 minutes ago, Kilgorehorn said:

I'm 76 and I am more concerned with the direction of our government than I have ever been. The turmoil in the 60's was violent but I never felt like out government was as unstable as it is now. Watergate was a mess, but Republicans stepped up and forced Nixon to resign. Trump's republican party has no spine and no soul.

I'm 75 and agree.  The assassinations, police beating protesters, overt violence was worse.  On a one to one basis, groups openly discriminated.  But the system was still viable.  Nixon had his enemies list, but outrage and push back occurred when it was publicized.

Now, I have greater concerns about the middle class and youth stepping up and righting the ship.  We may be in for a loss of our democracy as we know it.

I hope not.

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I'm 50 and these last few years have been eye opening. I honestly don't think we can repair/move forward.

That breaks me.

It will take a world changing event to reunite this country.

I just turned 50 and I’m in the extract same spot except I don’t think anything short of an alien invasion will reunite this country.
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1 hour ago, immamac said:

Basically we have a few political shitheads in a radicalized party that need to be voted out of office and the problems will solve themselves. There is a metric fuckton of legislation that is passed by the house that just needs voted on in the senate that will fix a lot of issues we are seeing, the problem is they aren't voting. The reason they aren't voting is because of a radicalized party who has people on record trying to subvert the way the government should work, including Bill Barr who is very on-record stating his belief in Unitary Executive Theory. 

The problem is we are stuck in a time before the internet and before the population explosion happened in centralized (read: Urban and suburban areas). We are no longer even relatively an agrarian society and the majority of representation should reflect the industries that we are in (entertainment, technology, industry, etc) - it's also not hard to fucking help "farmers and ranchers" when the rest of the stuff works right. People care about food supply quite a bit and destructive legislation like the ethanol corn subsidy are more to blame than rational policy.

I can see myself running for office sometime in the near future, but the platform I will have is that it will all be driven through robo-vote. If the majority of the constituency doesn't vote then the vote is abstained on any legislation. If the constituency votes for something then the office votes for it etc. Representative democracy at a large scale wouldn't necessarily work, but until we get elected officials who actually represent their constituencies best interest instead of their donors or personal interest we will continue down the path of radicalization. 

The solution to this problem is to get the people who don't care about anything to fucking vote.  

Your platform better include free McRibs or you’re not getting my vote.  

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1 hour ago, immamac said:

Basically we have a few political shitheads in a radicalized party that need to be voted out of office and the problems will solve themselves. There is a metric fuckton of legislation that is passed by the house that just needs voted on in the senate that will fix a lot of issues we are seeing, the problem is they aren't voting. The reason they aren't voting is because of a radicalized party who has people on record trying to subvert the way the government should work, including Bill Barr who is very on-record stating his belief in Unitary Executive Theory. 

The problem is we are stuck in a time before the internet and before the population explosion happened in centralized (read: Urban and suburban areas). We are no longer even relatively an agrarian society and the majority of representation should reflect the industries that we are in (entertainment, technology, industry, etc) - it's also not hard to fucking help "farmers and ranchers" when the rest of the stuff works right. People care about food supply quite a bit and destructive legislation like the ethanol corn subsidy are more to blame than rational policy.

I can see myself running for office sometime in the near future, but the platform I will have is that it will all be driven through robo-vote. If the majority of the constituency doesn't vote then the vote is abstained on any legislation. If the constituency votes for something then the office votes for it etc. Representative democracy at a large scale wouldn't necessarily work, but until we get elected officials who actually represent their constituencies best interest instead of their donors or personal interest we will continue down the path of radicalization. 

The solution to this problem is to get the people who don't care about anything to fucking vote.  

Chuck Grassley is pushing 90, senile as fuck, and will easily win re-election.  He's a fucking shithead and was a 1/6 planner.  But he'll win anyway.  

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3 minutes ago, Gil Bang said:

Chuck Grassley is pushing 90, senile as fuck, and will easily win re-election.  He's a fucking shithead and was a 1/6 planner.  But he'll win anyway.  

this is exactly the problem.

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35 minutes ago, Kilgorehorn said:

I'm 76 and I am more concerned with the direction of our government than I have ever been. The turmoil in the 60's was violent but I never felt like out government was as unstable as it is now. Watergate was a mess, but Republicans stepped up and forced Nixon to resign. Trump's republican party has no spine and no soul.

Whoa, are you challenging Brat for the Surly Old title?

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4 hours ago, TwiceHorn said:

Well, yeah, there were more imminent personal threats in the Vietnam/Civil Rights eras.  But Soviet and Chinese communism were still an animating threat.  We don't have one of those anymore, at least outside the country.

I have seen, but not dove into, several articles positing that the fall of communism and the lack of a long-term animating enemy, are what let the two political parties fall into disarray.

I could see that. Without a uniting external enemy, we've turned on ourselves.

I'll be 50 this fall so I wasn't there to experience the 60's in any way. There seemed to be far more turmoil then and then add in Vietnam on the heels of the Cuban Missile Crisis and tensions were running high. But our Republic hangs more in the balance today than it did then, it seems.

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38 minutes ago, bolverk said:

Born in '71 and turned 51 a couple of weeks ago. Yes, it's worse than anytime in my living memory. Sure, I can get on board with the '60s being a rockier time right now, but this current era isn't over yet.

Agreed it should get worse from here. Polarization/balkanization will likely intensify with this ruling. 
 

The biggest thing driving us apart is something mentioned up thread. I’m beating a dead horse, but we’re at the end of a debt cycle. It’s shaping everything around us. We’re all fighting over a smaller economic pie. Inequality is increasing. It’s at the bottom of the geopolitical mess we’re seeing which is driving angst as well. Throw in massive corruption and you have what we have now. 

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1 hour ago, Pig Bellmont said:

We had a coordinated effort by a president to take the office for an additional term despite losing the electoral college and the popular vote. He had help from lawyers, members of Congress, members of state houses, the wife of a Supreme Court justice, people in the military, far right militia groups, and some in the DOJ. 
 

And yet, the media and seemingly everyone just keeps on going as if it was a minor disagreement in tax policy between two equal and legitimate candidates. Failing to punish those at the top - or even take it seriously- for literally trying to topple 200+ years of American Democracy has fucked us beyond repair.  
 

Add to this the fact that local elections are gerrymandered so precisely that the outcome isn’t really seriously in doubt - it becomes impossible to create change from the voting booth. 
 

We are at an inflection point SCOTUS throwing out right to choose and inviting states to criminalize people for being gay. I don’t believe the public will tolerate this. I can’t predict what happens next, but forcing the criminalization of abortion, contraception, and other popular conduct will have a major back lash

That's what so many, even here, are missing. Things may not be as violently turbulent for the average American at this moment as in 1969 but the government is in so much worse shape than it was then. No matter the turbulence there was always a foundation to see the country through and ensure it doesn't become a straight up dictatorship.  Now that just isn't the case anymore. We had one coup attempt that's gone completely unpunished for the political leaders who instigated it and that followed a presidential term that was completely self serving with traitorous ties to an enemy nation by the president and his entire political party. A nation that we are now in a proxy war against controlled the white house just 2 years ago. 

We aren't in the 1960s. We're in 1929 with no safety net and a broken system of government. 

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it's not the civil war or the sixties...yet.

we haven't had assassinations...but certainly not for lack of trying. Whitmer, Pence, Kavanaugh...

and we don't have the draft and boys getting killed daily...but we do have mass casualty shooting events with some frequency, including children. 

it's def the worst it's been in my lifetime anyway.

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it's not the civil war or the sixties...yet.
we haven't had assassinations...but certainly not for lack of trying. Whitmer, Pence, Kavanaugh...
and we don't have the draft and boys getting killed daily...but we do have mass casualty shooting events with some frequency, including children. 
it's def the worst it's been in my lifetime anyway.

I think one thing different during the 60s/70s was there was a feeling of hope. That we were making progress. Now we seem to be regressing which exacerbates the feeling of hopelessness.
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1 hour ago, bad_teammate said:

I absolutely believe this could blow up into a truly serious social moment in America. Abortion actually impacts the lives of white voters; women specifically.

 

I absolutely believe jack shit will come out of it.  I have seen no evidence to date that all the jackassery from the GQP will ever have any consequences.

Prove me wrong Karens.

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Gotta be 60s for me. Prolly some early 70s too.

Spoiler

unfocused ramble follows

My childhood normal was spending my Kindergarten years living in Selma in a knocked-down-a-peg Southern Mansion next to Sturdivant Hall (google it) except ours had been split into a duplex, and we rented the north side. More Flannery O'Connor than Faulkner. Anyway, I played with Legos within a few blocks, a mile at most, of every single historic Selma Civil Rights thing you have ever seen photos of. And didn't know shit about it.

But what I do know, is there was a palpable siege mentality in the air. Even for a little kid, if you have for practical purpose roving partisan bands out in the countryside, that simmer spreads to everything.

I used to go to a summer camp, we'd meet at the YMCA and get on a little Bluebird bus and drive through some hills to a lake with some cabins. Then, properly exhausted, we'd wind back down into town. Seemed like it took forever but prolly 10-12 miles.

One day, we slowed down in the middle of nowhere, some browned-out fields and random shacks. A white woman standing by a parked car stopped our bus. She got on. She was focused, hair pulled back, a deputy shirt on. She looked us over, and started walking towards us. As she passed me, I saw the pistol on her hip. She stopped by one child and took him off the bus. We moved on without an explanation. At the Y our moms and dads gathered us up and we drove home and I still have no clue what was in the air that day. People may have been afraid to go to Selma, but out in the County was where things got really throw-back.

Later on through my mom's job I got to meet people like Rev. FD Reece and probably many more that to me were just "my math teacher" or "that lady. The 70s were more superficially mellow. Still, Mama bundled us to hear Wallace bellow in a hot sticky night at Bloch Park so we could get free (shitty vinegar fat-ass racist-prepared) BBQ afterwards.

There was a mysterious radical encampment somewhere west of town called "Love City" where black and white and drugs and group sex was on all day, said the deacons mumbling off to the side and making my 15-year-old self eager to explore, to no avail.

First person I ever asked to move out of the road so I could drive by was a fucking Klansman who was blocking my way home from work-- My job was at a plant hidden behind a slough of the Alabama River, these jackwads didn't even know existed because they weren't even from Selma but had "claimed" an off-to-the-side malarial patch of lowland as their home-base and compound while they gathered from all over, especially North Alabama but maybe your bastard uncle was there too in Elvis sideburns and a scowl. Anyway, I appear out of the Spanish-moss mist in my yellow VW Bug smack in the midst of their Unknowable Secret Klompound like the ghost of Stuart riding around their rear flank. There was mystification and discordant shouts. I remember looking up at the Pillsbury-Inquisition-suit chinless Swiss Hobo Probably from Boaz standing by my car, he stepped back and gave me a little "It's cool man" wave-through as if he was some kind of authority.

Man I miss that Bug.

 

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Pretty sure someone started a thread with this same premise near the end of W's reign with the Iraq war as the driving divisive force (occupy and tea party both happening too).  Shit is bad right now, real bad.  Shit has been real bad before.  Maybe we correct course.  Maybe we don't.

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On 6/25/2022 at 11:09 AM, Immaculate Vibes said:

Agreed it should get worse from here. Polarization/balkanization will likely intensify with this ruling. 
 

The biggest thing driving us apart is something mentioned up thread. I’m beating a dead horse, but we’re at the end of a debt cycle. It’s shaping everything around us. We’re all fighting over a smaller economic pie. Inequality is increasing. It’s at the bottom of the geopolitical mess we’re seeing which is driving angst as well. Throw in massive corruption and you have what we have now. 

I just have to add....what a load of crypto-bro oligarch-excusing bullshit.  The pie isn't materially smaller.  Total wealth has grown at functionally the same rate since 1970 - and grown it has.  The DISTRIBUTION is what has changed, radically and unequally.  Inequality is an issue, but it's not because we're at the mythical "end of money -- let's return to the gold standard and crypto!"  It's because, largely in RESPONSE to the egalitarian waves born in the 60s, the rules changed to favor the elite and wealthy, and protect (via concentrated and universal gerrymandering) the politicians who would protect them.

Kind of like how the Supreme Court of Texas was once super liberal and populist (well into the 80s).  Then the insurance companies etc. realized they could play that game even better, organized and pushed concepts like "tort reform," overwhelming any populist or reasonable sentiment left, snuffing it out.  Now, the SCOTX is a wholly-owned subsidiary of insurance companies and the like.

Pigs get fat.  Hogs get slaughtered.  I'd compare these times more to the robber baron era than the 60s.

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3 hours ago, Brisketexan said:

I'd compare these times more to the robber baron era than the 60s.

Yep.  The Gilded Age at the end of the 1800s.  And Teddy Roosevelt ain't walking through that door.

Edited by Biff Tannen
been spelling it wrong my whole life apparently
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Things were more obviously at a breaking point in the 60s.  We're in a Constitutional crisis right now, with a Supreme Court of political hacks and a political party that controls many state legislatures telegraphing that they'll install a GQPer into office regardless of the true election results.  But we don't have violence in the streets or a situation where even the white GOPers have to worry about their kids getting getting drafted into war unless they were wealthy.  Instead, we have a country brainwashed by facebook and Tucker and paying more attention to Johnny Depp/Amber Heard than rising fascism.  Just look at the posts on this board, saying why are you hysterical, women can just travel to other states, they'll never go after other things.  We're entertaining ourselves to death, while the fascists take over the country.

This was rambling.  But I don't think the issue is division of the country, so much as that most of the country is living in an alternate reality, and can't work up the enthusiasm to care about anyone or anything, so long as they can live in their 4 bedroom house in the burbs and afford cable with Fox News on it.

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1 hour ago, Brisketexan said:

Pigs get fat.  Hogs get slaughtered.  I'd compare these times more to the robber baron era than the 60s.

Yep.  As of yet, there is nothing like the Vietnam draft and war placing the lives of young'uns at immediate risk.  That and the tie-in to civil rights made for a toxic and actionable brew.

But, I think the average person has more knowledge or information than in the robber baron era.  And, I suppose the misinformation needs to be included, as well.

Edited by TwiceHorn
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I was born in the 60's so obviously too young to experience them first hand in any meaningful way, but will echo it seems like we are an inflection point.

My opinion is that America is never going to be a unified front again, that shipped sailed with facebook and cable news, and that the future will be less federalists and more states-rights driven and you will see populations self-sort and self select and even more political and social regional lines of demarcation will form to bolster the geographical lines.

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I always liked the yo-yo up the stairs metaphor. It’s not as low as it has been, but it is as low as it has ever been for this part of the staircase. There’s never a guarantee that the yo-yo will come back up. It’s our job to make sure it comes back up. It feels like it is about to snap off the string and tumble back to the bottom, right now, but society needs to band together and yank that hand up one more time. 

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7 minutes ago, Eastwood said:

I always liked the yo-yo up the stairs metaphor. It’s not as low as it has been, but it is as low as it has ever been for this part of the staircase. There’s never a guarantee that the yo-yo will come back up. It’s our job to make sure it comes back up. It feels like it is about to snap off the string and tumble back to the bottom, right now, but society needs to band together and yank that hand up one more time. 

To continue the metaphor, the other hand is actively bringing down the yo yo hand because it is operating in a different reality.

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Obviously it’s worse now.  That’s based on all the posters who said they’re not having kids in the “Cope” thread.  
 

If it was worse back in the 60s then many of those same posters would not have been born.

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In my mid-50's and I was a toddler in the 60's, so I missed that.  Amazingly, I only missed school segregation by 10 years.  Seems crazy now .. by the time I was in elementary school no one talked about it.

I started paying attention to the world around the end of the Ford administration.  I knew Nixon was bad and Ford looked clumsy.  People around me genuinely supported Carter and, four years later, were pretty enthusiastic about Reagan.  The same people.  It was OK to switch your vote.  There wasn't much of a divide and no one talked about red or blue states.  Everyone hated the Soviet Union and were kinda afraid of getting nuked.

The Supreme Court seemed to be the place to go when America needed rights expanded.  We studied landmark cases in school and the common theme seemed to be expansion of liberty and freedom and rights to groups that the founders would have never conceived of, but now in the "modern" 70's and 80's the Supremes were wiser and could stretch the Constitution to cover those people.  At least that's what it looked like to me.

The country was getting a lot cleaner, thanks to the EPA.  People used to throw trash in the street.  Street corners had piles of cigarette butts and soda cans.  Within a few years, I remember trash going way down.  Trash cans all said "Pitch in!" and kids would run around finding trash for the trash can.  Big cities were filled with smog.

No one spent a minute on a web site, or on a phone, or tweeting stuff.  We didn't even have cable.  We thought the microwave was a miracle invention.  Suddenly we had VCRs and cordless phones.  Every new invention was attributed to the success of the space program.

I think, at least in the 70's and 80's, we all had a big common enemy that could kill us anytime they wanted.  Strangely, that may have kept us together.  I saw the Berlin Wall fall on TV and just could not believe it .... here comes worldwide peace!  Not...  I think the country started splitting shortly after the USSR broke up and it's gotten worse over time.  I don't think the country is really that split.  I think if you have a flat on a roadside at night you're still likely to get help from a stranger.

But I do think that the people that ARE the dividers have figured out how to get power and most of us are watching them duke it out.

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On 6/27/2022 at 9:23 PM, Texas Jeff said:

 

60’s toddler here, too. I’d like to echo your perception of the highes courts in our stare, and federally. We still believed in rights, freedom, and the American dream back then.

Of course the ‘60s were politically fraught. We were fighting a war whose justification was suspect to a large percentage of citizens, and the federal government was taking steps to bring our nation closer to our stated ideals. Which heightened racial animus.

My first memory of that turbulence concerned bussing. An initiative designed to try to remedy one of the most glaring examples of our failure to comply with the Civil Rights Act. Brown v BOE predates the passage of the act. It addressed government discrimination. Individuals can still discriminate. The mainstream right has become so radical they will accept utterly trashing the Ninth Amendment. The right to privacy had become a de facto INDIVIDUAL right, and they feel smug they circumvented the need for an Amendment to strip away individual rights.

Which is why I think things are worse, now. The Radicalans are at war with the principles of our Republic. Radicalans think it reasonable for federal agents to, without a warrant, break into homes and assault citizens, because of immigration. There is no part of that which is not at odds with our founding principles. 
 
Along with free travel among the states, they are targeting representative government. They have embraced a perversion of that, instead; one of their alternative facts. Yet another example of Radicalans abandoning truth itself. Obviously, they don’t believe in the free market, either, as they call the information product of the free market: “fake news.”
 

Radicalans have the goal of absolute power and have defined their path to victory. They have no idea of what the country they are trying to create will be, other than “great again.” Monarchical rule (really the rule of the mob boss) is a possibility, so even that nebulous description is a lie they tell themselves. So, yes, this era is much more dangerous. Only the civil war era is analogous.

 

 

 

 

 

Edited by Willfully Horn
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