04-10-2019, 10:54 PM
(04-10-2019, 04:09 PM)Snowflake1996 Wrote:(04-10-2019, 03:23 PM)pbrower2a Wrote: Is there a time in American life in which life is so odious as it is now? Even in the Gilded Age, technological progress led to real improvements in people's lives. Today most of us are obliged to suffer with a smile and support reactionary politicians who give rights to the rich and responsibilities to the poor.
We may need an economic meltdown on the scale of 1929-1932 to weaken the power of our current elites. We need an economy in which one must do good to do well; anything else is a nightmare. We need to be more self-reliant so that we not become debt-bonded serfs. We need to be able again to improve ourselves with sweat equity. It was the economic meltdown of 1929-1932 that fostered the building of small business instead of companies best described as bloated, monopolistic, bureaucratized behemoths.
I think there’s two differences between the gilded age and today. One good and one bad. The good is that we have something resembling a social safety net today that was virtually non-existent in the gilded age. Medicaid, Obamacare, Medicare, labor laws on children and minimum wages, foodstamps, section 8 housing, public school grants, disability and worker’s compensation, unemployment insurance, etc. However unlike the technological advances of the gilded age which improved life, our technological advances have done very little to do that. And most importantly: the current social safety net hasn’t improved much and is only there to mitigate the most severe of damages.
It is the increased prosperity that has allowed a social safety net. The technological advances that we have, except in medicine and some computer uses, do not clearly improve our lives. People could dance just as well to a 45 single in a jukebox in the 1940s as to a boom-box today. The music of the 1940s was better anyway!
I have told people who thought that it would be terrible to live in the 1920s because the devices of entertainment were far less refined in their technological sophistication that that would have been the least of their problems. If one was not a WASP one lived under a severe handicap. Your boss could demand unpaid overtime at will. Women were very much under the thumb of men. If your father was disabled and you were in high school, then your career in factory work was about to begin and your high-school education was at a permanent and irrevocable end.
I can excuse the plutocrats of the Gilded Age because capitalist economics first creates wealth before it creates human equity.
Quote:I think this ties into what the really bad difference is today: the lack of hope from people. Noam Chomsky remembers the 1930’s well and he noted going into the 2012 election that people today just don’t have hope like they use to in his time. He even believed that the crazed right wing would takeover the levies of power in the next election cycle (He was off by 4 years: 2012 vs 2016). Source: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.indepen...html%3famp
We are under the rule of people who believe themselves entitled to everything that they can grab and that anything that the rest of us have is a privilege to be seized whenever the 'need' arises. Medical care, property rent, and college education have never been more expensive. If someone ever tells me how great Donald Trump is -- then I must ask why I so often think of suicide. I may be stranded for the rest of my miserable life in a job that I hate in a community that I despise. And I am to be thankful to the sadistic, rapacious monsters who dominate American life?
At times I wish that I had taken up chain smoking as a youth so that I might be dead of lung cancer now.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.
