Pattern Recognition

A big part of understanding history is based on recognizing patterns.

A big part of being a historian is pattern recognition.

When one generation passes the baton to the next, often the next culture running the next leg of the relay is either runs a slow leg of decline or a fast leg, marked by improvement – either being launched by the preceding generation.

Whether the result of that oscillating process is generally good or generally bad is a matter for history to inform – but from my observations, it seems that there is sort of a sinusoidal wave effect of cultural sloth and sociopolitical unrest versus cultural revival and socioeconomic progress that travels through time, and it exhibits a trend to one direction or the next – either positive or negative.

The last time we had such unrest as we see today was in the Free Love 1960’s, which was preceded by a period of post-WWII prosperity unparalleled in our history. No doubt the Kennedy-Johnson-Nixon-Carter years were filled with economic and social uncertainty, but things began to settle down toward the end of the Seventies which ended with the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980.

The Seventies of All in the Family’s Archie and Edith Bunker gave way to Crockett and Tubbs (Miami Vice) and Gordon “Greed is good” Gekko (Wall Street).

The Eighties were great, as I recall, I remember suspenders, three-piece suits, silk floral print ties and tie bars. I wanted to be a corporate lawyer or work on Wall Street. I wanted to live like the characters on Thirtysomething. Hell, I was thirtysomething in the Eighties.

The Friends Nineties were nice as well. I am at the tail end of the Boomer generation, but we grew out of the 14% mortgages of the Carter years, and business was good, the living was easy. That feeling lasted into the early 2000’s – even the post 9/11 years were prosperous (until 2008) even with a couple of forever wars kicking off, but the experience of 9/11 united Americans more than we recognize.

What is curious thing is that most of us were in high school or college at some point during the unrest of the Sixties. We created this period of prosperity, and our kids grew up in it soaking up the things we liked and enjoyed.

Things turned ugly in 2008 when the Cultural Marxists ended decades of racial progress by leveraging race and white guilt to elect Barack Obama, perhaps the most racially divisive, anti-constitutional president since Woodrow Wilson.

The kids of our kids were born and grew up with Obama and his politics as the only thing they knew about America government. Permissiveness and coddling produced kids who eventually grew into maladjusted and mentally ill adults.

The decline of the wave had begun.

Obama’s two terms of racial division led to a 2016 election where Democrats weaponized every tool of government to try to get Trump, something that has continued for almost a decade – starting when Trump descended the gilded escalator in Trump Tower until today.

They elected a dead man who campaigned from his basement by manipulating “public health” laws and pretending everything they were doing was to help people.

Even the entertainment became preachy and hectoring about how much America sucked – and not sucked today, but historically so. From race obsessed historical visual vehicles to lectures about how America was an anti-Muslim warmongering nation, guilt was hauled into theaters and television by the dump truck load. LGBQ was taken over by the T as transgenderism was pushed on toddlers and tender age children by mentally ill parents and teachers. Entire school systems were taken over by Critical Race Theory spewing DEI-ers.

During the Biden years, police became criminals, criminals became victims, organized theft and looting became reparations, and arson and riots became “mostly peaceful” – and some would say the Democrats turned a blind eye, but they did not. They organized bail funds for those arrested – even a sitting VP participated. Democrats shamelessly rolled out a two-tiered justice system leading to patently obvious lawfare and persecutions, ensnaring a former president and anyone who supported him. Never has “the process is the punishment” been truer. All this against a background of Democrats claiming that the people being persecuted are the ones who are “destroying democracy.”

Kids graduating from universities this year have suffered through two years of Covid hysteria driven isolation and remote schooling and now they end their college careers in a storm of antisemitic protests. I must believe these past four years have not been a fun college experience for them.

Is it any wonder the kids are NOT all right?

Who could ever be traditionally normal growing up in such a hostile environment? It must be like growing up in the middle of a battlefield.

Even though it is hard to see how we don’t incur some damage, the good news is that it will swing back.

There are rational young people out there who recognize this is not the way forward for America – or them, personally. They do not want this. It is interesting that many of the TV programs and movies from the 1980’s through to the 2000’s have captured a large viewership in the eighteen to thirty demographic.

Time will tell if the pattern is about to change.