Devolving America

GOETHE SAID: "All the great thoughts have long since been thought. It is left to us to think them anew." Oh, how true. Even mediocre and idiotic thoughts, the endlessly repeated cliches. Who among us hasn't said something like "I dont' get mad often, but when I do, watch out!" Or, the ubuquitous "Society is going downhill. This new generation has no work ethic or morals"..blah blah... When Socrates was walking around Athens corrupting teenagers Socrates haterswere making that exact complaint, that human civilization was on a downhill fall, evidenced, indeed proven, mainly by the shiftless, worthless current crop of young people. And yet, somehow, here we are. Alive and well in the early to mid twenty first century, online and frisky as ever, if nothing else. Compared to the alternatives, that aint half bad.Despite all the gloom and doomin the media inin our hearts and minds, homo sapiens appears to bemaking progress, advancing, not declining. Facts and statistics, which don't lie, indicate that the human race is much healthier and long lived, less violent, though its hard to believe, and much better housed, clothed,fed, and educated than even one generation ago, much less in bygone centuries. If the young people in ancientAthenswereindeed taking societ morally downhill,and ifyoung people throughout hisotry hadtaken society on the road to destruction, where would we be today? Perish the thought. Perhaps living like packs of wild primates, roving paleolithically in extended families. In 1971, when I was sixteen, my father, a World War Two veteran, told me that the United States was going straight downhill, and was doomed. Maybe he was thinking about the social turmoil of the time, hippies,race riots,war protests. Nineteen sixties America was indeed a turbulent place. The young generation my father was complaining about is now the elderly demographic, and, generally speaking, has lived a productive live, without doing any discernable damage to the grand old republic, or the ret of the world. I have never had that "the kids are going to hell" feeling at any time in my life concerning the people comingup behind me.Even now, as I enter ancient elderly old age, I see no reason to be pessimistic about the younger generation. To me they seem a very impressive bunch, smart as whips. When I was in high school in teh early seventies Itook a look at myself and my classmates, and wondered how in hell the world would survive when we took it over. On balance, we didn't do half bad. Right now I am terrified by and worried about climate change and the apparent fact that we all have about a credit card's worth of plastic in our bodies, blood, and brains. Who wouldn't be, other than MAGA morons? And, in truth, I am shocked and dismayed by the apparent decline of morality in American culture. I see as evidence the willingness of millions of Americans to support, follow, and adore a career criminal as president, to fabricate completely false scenarios as a pretext for forcing their regressive agenda on the nation and world, and the sheer volume of vitriole, hatred, and violence everywhere in American society. It is not at all unreasonable to cite these and many other observable phenomenon as evidence of societal moral decline. However, none of this can be laid exclusively at the feet of the current young generation, nor any other generation. As we say, there is plenty of blame to go around. We seem to live in a world of steady, constant progress, hindered by the unavoidable fact that despite all our progress, we remain, for the time being, basically the same wild animals we were only a few short millenia ago.