56
Same but worse
(sh.itjust.works)
The difference is that now I’m a wage slave
That kid 20 years ago still had the expectations of a better future, of having a nice and fulfilling life. Now, it's clear we're outstretching everything in order to keep things barely afloat, and some form of collapse is inevitable. It's not just people that were kids back then and felt life was better,
A while back, Michael Moore got a bunch of MAGAs of all ages together and asked one question. "When did America stop being great?"
The ones who were born in the 1930s thought that things started going wrong in the 1950s. the ones born in the 1940s thought it was the 1960s. The ones born in the 1960s thought it was in the 1980s...
Decline as the oligarchs siphon money out of the classes.
Years ago, a single factory worker could buy a house, raise a huge family, send a few to college, have a couple of cars, take a nice yearly vacation.
then a couple of kids, and student debt
then a big vacation every couple of years.
Now a single factory worker, if you can still find a factory can just feed themselves and rent a cheap apartment.
I was born in 1982. I think I have a good excuse for thinking America went to shit, oh say, around the end of 2001.
Personally, my 20s sucked. My 30s were much better.
'93 here and I think the passage of the Patriot Act was a pretty important demarcation line, not just for abandonment of due process, but also when all the major networks embraced telling their audience who to hate.
That was how it was before the Vietnam War. The news media disconnected itself from the foreign policy desires of the State Department during the Vietnam War because they actually saw the lies on the ground and reported the facts.
The first Iraq war started the change back to having the news media play lapdog again with "embedded reporters" meaning that the news media couldn't wander by themselves like they did in Vietnam.
So we have shifted back to a news media basically toeing the line for the wishes of the government.
A huge difference between the coverage of Vietnam versus the first and second gulf wars was the change in media broadcasting regulations.
While you would think a nationalized service like broadcast airwave licenses would lead to a state-controlled media, in the US it led to the opposite effect because of the Fairness Doctrine and the general cultural expectation that news media would be impartial and dedicated to truth.
When privately distributed cable news rose in the early 90's starting with Ted Turner starting CNN and 24-hour news cycles, it led to news becoming a unmoderated, uncontrolled, unlicensed commercial entity that could do or say whatever it wanted without oversight, and could get funding from any source.
Ronald Reagan was deregulating the media from Inauguration Day 1981.
There used to be a thing called 'The Fairness Doctrine' that required stations to give time to opposing viewpoints if they ran an editorial. There were restrictions on how many TV/radio stations one entity could own.
Just look at children's TV. Once Reagan came in you started seeing half hour long commercials for GI Joe and The Transformers.
Life started to suck when the responsibilities came.
I feel it is less responsibilities and more the societal awareness that comes with them that tends to make the change. When you start paying bills you start dealing directly with greedy corporations, landleeches, and greedy employers, all of whom view you as a commodity rather than a human being.
Life being pay to play, as it has been for a couple hundred years, is where I feel the "downward trend of society" feelings come from.
Nostalgia is a universal feeling that fascists have been leveraging for centuries to get average idiots to pick up weapons.
Resist fascism. Resist nostalgia.
Not all nostalgia is equal.
There's wanting to go back to when all the slaves were happy and there's remembering when you could go to the airport and buy a ticket for cash.
Right, facists harvest that anger and lust for a better time then tell people and it’s [this group’s fault] and that they stole it from you.
This is how class warfare keeps people from joining together and rising up
It's the blissful ignorance and, most importantly, the lack of existential fear many people are missing. All your basic needs were provided (if you had a safe childhood).
Unfortunately there are way too many bad, powerful people believing that humans require to feel existential fear to be "productive"…
The kid was happy, adult is not.
Joy is indeed that impactful
When you are a kid, you haven't let life pass you by yet.
*30 years. FTFY
it’s the responsibilities and accountability that’s different
Do some acid it’ll return your mind to kid for a bit
You holding?
Nice try, FBI, nice try
this post was submitted on 31 Dec 2025
56 points (98.3% liked)
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