Yeah, you’re probably right. We have it worse than any previous generation.
From some of your posts here in the past I’m gonna guess we’re probably about the same age (I was born in '65). While we lived through the Carter years it was as kids. Unless your family was in dire financial straits (mine wasn’t, at least as I recall) we’re going on retrospect or that 20/20 hindsight. Hell, even the early 80’s and Reagan’s first term saw my last 3 years of high school and enlistment in the Army. Not until I became a politically-aware adult could I pass judgement on those Carter years. I’d say I was “tuned in” as far as politics go by the early 90’s, although I had formed political opinions a few years before (i.e. conservative ones).
I guess maybe that’s how it’s gone down through the centuries: the era of your “coming of age” will be viewed in hindsight unless of course you were (for instance) a Jewish child in Europe during the Holocaust or a kid during the Plague, then it impacts you in a BIG way. For the vast majority of us we will pass judgement on our teeth-cutting years later on in life. We can say the decay began in the 60’s but someone a decade older than you and I might not see it that way.
Well that’s not exactly true either and it’s hardly what I said. The generation in recent history which had it the worst is whichever you qualify as being the one that lived through 1945. Most historians agree more humans were killed that year than in any year in recorded human history and that is significant considering how many died during WWI.
I also never even began to suggest that it’s worse now than during the great depression, parts of the industrial age, during the civil war or many other really “bad times” in history. In fact I was quite specific about this being the first time it’s been as bad, or worse, than the Carter era recession days.
I was simply pointing out that in all the following generations, nobody was nostalgic for the “good old Carter days” and thus not agreeing with your generalization that “every generation has said that.”
That is true IF you are basing everything solely up personal experience and opinion. But you can research these things pretty easily. For example somebody who studies the 70s today in detail can have a much fuller picture of events than the people who were living through it and dealing with it on an individual level. While they obviously will have a greater “personal” perspective they might not understand the larger picture at all.
Just as a soldier who landed at D-Day will have a personal understanding of that event that nobody else can relate to in the same way who wasn’t there, it doesn’t mean they understand the larger operations of the European theater or the politics involved. They can of course learn these things “after the fact” like everyone else.
Just look at how much of “our” history that we learned growing up had to be revised at the end of the cold war when Russia declassified a great deal of WWII era and cold war history.
There is only 6000 years of recorded human history that we know of. Every civilization comes to an end they simply don’t keep evolving. After the fall of Rome the world was plunged into the Dark Ages for centuries. We lost so much knowledge after that and events such as the destruction of the Library of Alexandria. One step forward and two steps back, I’d argue that we are devolving.