Never a Better Time to be Alive
In a way, American culture has nationalized a perspective that was popularized during the Obama administration and one that I hated to no end.
If you think back to those thrilling days of yesteryear (when we were introduced to "funemployment" and a dystopian "new normal"), almost everything that happened to Obama was "unexpected" or "unique" because, as we were told by the media had never happened to any other president and that was why we should simultaneously cut Obama some slack and be thankful we had such a uniquely qualified man who was better than us in every way to fail at handling it.
That perspective permeated the Obama years and continues today as the media looks back in wistful and fawning nostalgia to the Age of Obama.
But it was stupid. It was the combination of contemporary arrogance with a total rejection of history (it wasn't that people didn't know history, they just chose to ignore it) because in every case, similar things HAD happened to prior presidents - and often just a few years back in the Bush administration.
For some reason, some Americans have come to believe that whatever happens to us is the worst ever in history, it's never happened before, we are uniquely damaged by those event and America just sucks.
That's just moronic. It seems to me that there are those who work hard to make the issues we face SEEM worse because we want to be special and believe that somehow we are hurt more than any other population at any other time in history.
That's just total crap. It's like the college campus snowflake culture has blanketed America.
I've written before that we are undeniably the healthiest, most prosperous, most free and most mobile world that has ever existed (and those things are distributed more widely than ever before) and as such we are the best equipped population in the history of the world to understand, avoid and manage disasters of Malthusian proportions.
There has never been a better time to be alive and to be in America.
I once wrote an editorial titled "Consumers of Unhappiness" where I proposed that:
"The perpetually aggrieved are essentially consumers of unhappiness – it is as essential to them as food, clothing and shelter are to the rest of us. I was taught that the world was filled with beauty and it is natural to seek good feeling and pleasure – not necessarily to be hedonistic, but to be happy. Even the Declaration of Independence lists the “Pursuit of Happiness” right up there with life and liberty and yet these snowflakes pursue unhappiness. They have created this Hobbesian universe where pain, oppression and discord rule the day – but isn’t this what progressivism teaches? That there is only envy, rich people are only rich because they are stealing from the poor, earth’s climate is doomed due to capitalists willing allow factories to belch smoke into the air and deadly chemicals into the rivers for nothing other than naked profit and everybody hates everybody else?
There does seem to be a proclivity for certain people to seek out pleasure through negative experiences."
America's true uniqueness rests in our ability to overcome obstacles.
America needs to buckle our chinstraps and get on with it.