Has It Always Been This Bad?

 Lots of people have been asking if America has ever been this crazy before.

Let's take the war over vaccination. About 56% of the American population is fully vaccinated.  As we start vaccinating more kids, that number will rise quickly into the 60s. According to the linked article, the steadfastly anti-vax are only at best 15% of the population. I want to pause on that, considering how fucking noisy they have been. It's worth recalling Yeats:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre   

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere   

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst   

Are full of passionate intensity.

Yeats wrote that poem in 1920, interestingly, that is within the era of the 1918 Flu pandemic and shortly after World War I, which was pretty awful.

Also in the 1920s, the Klan became a major factor in American politics. They marched down Pennsylvania Avenue and Harding met their leaders in the Oval Office. They largely controlled several state governments, including Indiana. The "new" Klan was not only anti-Black, but anti-immigrant, anti-Catholic and anti-woman suffrage. Recently, the Greenwood massacre (if not the Rosewood massacre) has become common knowledge. In Tennessee, a teacher was convicted of teaching evolution. The Harding Administration was so corrupt, only the Trump Administration exceeds it in venality. 

So, looked JUST at the 1920s,  that's an era that's as crazy and mean as ours in many ways. The anti-fluoride, anti-communist 1950s were pretty crazy. Most Americans would be freaking shocked at the conduct of people in the entire 19th century.

The problem, I think, is two-fold. 

First, the period from 1960-2000 was indeed crazy. Hijackings, assassinations, Watergate, AIDs, Oklahoma City...I could go on. As humans, we tend to erase that stuff from our memory. We don't dwell on the horrible things that happen to other people.

Second, and more importantly, we are in the era of immediate gratification and immediate information overload. We want something, we go to Amazon and three days later it's at our door. We want to watch a TV show, we stream it. We are no longer patient about anything. As a result, the natural slow pace of change is simply too slow. We see this with the debate over BBB and arresting Trump and his minions. Why hasn't it happened NOW is simply not the way the world really works.

The immediate information is even more problematic.

We live in a world of trolls and hot-takes. Social media actively encourages trolls, most notably Trump himself, who is best understood as a WWE heel or a Twitter troll. Trolling seeks emotional over intellectual engagement and coaxes us into a constant state of white-hot rage. Meanwhile, the Hot Take Industrial Complex churns out pieces that lack context or historical perspective. Maybe relax and wait a bit?

Jefferson famously said he would rather live with newspapers and no government than government with no newspapers, which just goes to show that Jefferson could be a blithering idiot. Replace "newspapers" with Facebook and Twitter and you have Jefferson's dystopia of angry screeching over ephemera, while important work is being done.

We struggle with two real problems. The first is that no one knows history and the second is a tidal wave of social media bullshit. We have developed the attention span of fruit flies in a world that needs more wisdom.