Every week on Monday morning, the Council and our invited guests weigh in at the Watcher’s Forum with short takes on a major issue of the day, the culture or daily living. This week’s question: What’s The Biggest Change You’ve Noticed In America Over the Past 20 Years?
The Independent Sentinel: In the last twenty years, America’s Republic has been successfully attacked by far-left ideologues passing themselves off as mainstream Democrats, moderate Republicans, college intellectuals, journalists, religious people, and union and corporate leaders. They’ve infiltrated unions, political parties, churches, colleges, the media, corporations, government at all levels and they are slowly, successfully inalterably changing the way we think about freedom, morals, and individualism.
The majority of us no longer value rugged individualism, we are collectivists.
Morals are all relative. There is no evil, just excuses.
We no longer pride ourselves on self-reliance because we can get things for free; we invite people here for freebies and wonder why we have a nation of people expecting, no, demanding, to live off the government dole.
We have transformed Palestine into the image radical terrorist groups want us to have and we have made Israel into the enemy. We are cozy with the very people who want us dead and our values obliterated from the face of the earth.
Our representatives rob us of our freedoms and are making government into our god. As Mr. Obama accelerates the process, he is cheered by Democrats in Congress while too many Republicans look away.
People are losing their freedom of speech but because we don’t like those people, it’s okay. We can even send them to re-education camps if they have dissenting opinions or we can punish them severely for private conversations. We’ve replaced common sense with PC, which is just another tool to rob us of free speech.
They want our guns so we can truly be completely powerless victims.
Our privacy is gone.
States’ rights are evaporating and there’s little pushback.
Where once we considered anyone trying to tear down our capitalist system an enemy of the state, we now allow them to do their damage publicly. They are no longer vilified. They are mainstream and no one dare say anything out of PC-ism or out of fear we will be called conspiracy nuts.
Mr. Obama has said he is disarming us so we can never again be a powerful military force in the world, and Americans now like that idea as if all the hatred and violence aimed at us will go away if only we aren’t mighty.
An absurd and extreme interpretation of climate warming – change – chaos – disruption allows the government to steal private land, close coal plants, greatly restrict oil and gas and gives full rein to a corrupt green energy industry. It is lowering our standard of living.
The rise of big government is driving us towards bankruptcy but we were so okay with it, we voted for its worse purveyor twice though some of our votes were to atone for slavery and civil rights abuses in a warped notion of justice.
Our leaders lie to us and spread propaganda, our Supreme Court acknowledges it but is comfortable with a certain level of it, and Americans don’t seem to care all that much. Mr. Obama will tell lie-after-lie, seriously impacting our way of life, destroying our healthcare system, and he will violate law after law without much opposition. His popularity and the popularity of the Democrats has suffered little. He released tens of thousands of criminal illegals – his voting block – and it’s hardly produced the anger it should be producing.
The outside forces of totalitarianism from every other nation in the world are closing in and we now accept tyranny from our own leaders.
We aren’t even going to be Democratic Socialists at the end of this, it will be much worse and it won’t be Utopia.
WAR IS PEACE
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH
The Razor: If you want to see how things have changed watch Blazing Saddles, Airplane! or a few episodes of Hogan’s Heroes. Now imagine those movies and TV show being made today. If you’re like me you can’t. Why is that?
We now live in an age of social McCarthyism where we all must censor ourselves to avoid offending certain groups, although Christians, white men and Southerners can still be safely degraded or made fun of. As a writer I’ve found myself censoring myself more today than at any other time in the past 20 years to avoid provoking needless firestorms of hatred. Self-censorship is a form of tyranny for writers and artists, and it is one that has grown over that time period.
What’s ironic is that while we have lost our freedom to express ourselves in regard to ideas, we do have more freedom to express our sexuality. But I don’t take comfort in that. Ideas are much more important than sex, and in a way sex is a distraction or safety valve along the lines of the Orwell’s 2 Minutes of Hate in 1984. Contrary to what Gender Studies professors might believe, no regime has ever been overthrown by a sexual revolution. No elite has been replaced, no economies liberalized. Such changes originate from ideas, and with those under siege by leftist censors (in contrary to 30 years ago when the censors were of the Right Tipper Gore excepted), everything is stagnating. As a result today’s art, be it music, movies, painting or what have you is complete rubbish. Can the stultifying political correctness that pervades our society today be blamed? Absolutely.
We live in a Victorian age of sorts, where opinions must be kept to ourselves unless they agree with everyone else’s. As a child in the 1970s I used to disparage that decade for being an era of high crime, high inflation, and bad music (Punk, New Wave and some art rock excepted). But now I remember that era and the ‘80s that followed as one where we had much more freedom to think and express ourselves in ways that are discouraged today. We live with mental straitjackets. It’s insidious and it disgusts me.
Simply Jews: As the time goes by, JFK (the airport, I mean) gets dirtier, the food less palatable, the employees get more hostile, and less and less of them speak English.
The Glittering Eye: I’m not sure this is what the question is getting at but I think the biggest changes I’ve seen are a consequence of the World Wide Web, specifically the availability of broadband Internet connections affordable for the average business or home user.
Those have changed the way we interact with each other, the way we do business, the way we work, way we shop, the way we learn, and the way we play.
Some forever, not for better
Some have gone and some remain
Some have gone and some remain
Ask Marion: After making a list of everything that has changed over the past 20+years, it came to me that what is really missing is hope and the average American’s turn inwards instead of outward that it caused; virtually everything else is intertwined or a symptom of our loss of hope and then our reaction to it; a process that slowly began closer to 60 years ago that has come to fruition in the past 20-years… and even more so for many people after President Obama’s promises turned out to be lies.
Taking a country of people, who felt they saved the world in the name of freedom, after WWI and WWII and lived through the most amazing 100 years of change and inventions in all of history combined, to where we find ourselves today is a long process and was certainly no accident.
The evil that lies at the heart of those that aim to control the rest of us… the ruling elite, the globalists, the NWO proponents who spawn ideologies and oppressive systems like Progressivism, Socialism, Communism, Fascism, Statism … never rests and slowly whittles away at every attempt by the common man to rule himself or even to have input that blocks their paths. The Great American Experiment was their greatest thorn. Thomas Jefferson and John Adams warned us… in order for a republic to survive you must have an educated and engaged populace. We have been neither for far too long!
The Babyboomers, indulged as they (we) were by parents and grandparents of ‘the greatest generation’ who wanted to spare their kids from the hard times and realities they lived through, thought they could change the world… Then they changed focus and thought they would all be rich and successful, spoiling and simultaneously hovering over their children along the way, and now many of them find themselves without savings, without pensions and either taking care of their aging parents and jobless children or having to move in with their parents because they have lost their own home… leaving few with hope, feelings of accomplishment or even a possibility of ever retiring. As a group, the Babyboomers went from Spoiled Dreamers to Hippies, to Yuppies, to Helicopter Parents and Grandparents to disenchanted Seniors who may never retire.
Fast forward to the Millennials, ages 18 to 34, many of whom have several degrees and the student loans sans jobs to pay them to prove it, who voted for President Obama en mass, and you find a group even more disillusioned with government than those boomers who worked and voted for Nixon after giving 18-year-olds the vote were after Watergate.
If we look back over the past 20-years, the past 50-years, there have been more disappointments than moments that stirred Americans’ patriotism and dared them to dream. And politics aside, of all the presidents during that time, only Ronald Reagan inspired us as a nation with both his words and his actions and didn’t disappoint us with a scandal, something that was evident by the throngs of Americans of all ages and from both parties that lined the streets of Ronald Reagan’s funeral procession after having been out of office and out of the public eye for so many years.
What should have happened to people who had so much and lived in a country full of possibilities is that we reached out to each other, joined hands and got involved in our communities, in politics, in our kids’ education and in our churches. Instead we became isolated and pulled away from community activities, politics and hands-on involvement in our schools… and we stopped going to church. We have also let the Internet, social media and electronics rob us of the conversations and the rich values of personal interaction; many Millennials prefer texting to talking. Letters have been reduced to a #hashtag. We stopped instilling the values and traditions that made our country great and we focused on ourselves, thought we could manage our own little worlds and we filled our spare time with mind-numbing activities that helped dumb us and our children down… all supported by the under-current of those with a Progressive agenda, the Alinskyites, the focused parents and grandparents of those who are in power today.
Courage like love must have hope for nourishment; somehow Americans lost their hope and along with it their courage and drive to fight back! The change hope would bring could save America… the question is can we dig deep enough to find it and elect the politicians that would bring real hope and change in time for the elections of 2014 and 2016?
“None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.” …Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
JoshuaPundit: There are a number of changes I could mention..but to me the biggest single change is digital electronics. It has been both a blessing and a curse, and frankly I’m not sure which way the scales tilt.
The positives are obvious – simply being able to do a search and access a large amount of knowledge on any topic imaginable is incredible. And it has been a major source of commerce.
The negatives are immense,and not nearly so obvious.Privacy is a thing of the past, and monitoring the population in a way Hitler or Stalin could only have dreamed of is a reality. Our freedom has decreased a great deal as a result.The American people have turned inward and the internet has been used effectively to spread propaganda and even slander of individuals as well as information, with the line between the two getting fuzzier each day.Objective journalism is largely disappearing and the 24 hour news cycle the internet made possible has infected our politics to the point where we now live with a permanent campaign.
Digital electronics has also been a major boon to crime (there’s a whole new category of so-called cyber-crime) plagiarism, copyright infringement and pornography, which has also infected the culture in negative ways. As a side note (pun intended), it pretty much destroyed the music business in terms of both livelihood and actual content, aided by the greed of the corporate interests that essentially purchased the industry.
The biggest negative to me is that digital electronics have made us incredibly dependent and vulnerable. At this point,communications, commerce, the food supply, power, transportation, banking, the very functioning of our society are centered around the idea of a bunch of little microchips working correctly. I don’t believe we have ever had a technological advance before that society was this dependent on, together with such limited safeguards against misuse or even major assaults like an EMP attack. Let’s hope our luck holds.
GrEaT sAtAn”S gIrLfRiEnD: It’s the tolerance for intolerance. Ad Hominum argumentum versus any true debates. Getting called all kind of phobic or racecardist names when e’r one has some worthy points to point out about the worthiness or worthlessness of ideas shoots down debate faster than a WWI observation balloon.
Well, there you have it.
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