Are we collectively up shit creek? (About, well, everything)

The BBQ Pit
21

How’s that old song go?

*They’re rioting in Africa
They’re starving in Spain
There’s hurricanes in Florida
And Texas needs rain

The whole world is festering with unhappy souls
The French hate the Germans, the Germans hate the Poles
The Italians hate Yugoslavs, South Africans hate the Dutch
And I don’t like anybody very much*

Shame I can’t post the complete lyric :smiley: But I first heard that song on one of my mom’s 1960s folk music records.

How about this one, from the 1980s:

Yeah we’re livin’ in a sick world
The man on the TV
Says we got lots of trouble overseas
What the hell do I care?
You think they care about me?
Stop sending money - send them all a bomb
(Warlord by Manowar)

22

And the major difference is that we don’t have an entire group of young people trying to change things. Sure, plenty of kids wear “the only Bush I trust is my own” shirts and watch the Daily Show, but overall none of us really seems up in arms about it. Of course this is probably all because there exists no draft, but still. Apathy is terrible.

23

Hell, in my day we had nuclear winters, Ronald Reagan was threatening to bomb Russia just to test that the mike was on, flocks of geese were setting off NORAD, and the Doomsday Clock was set to 11.58. Oh, yeah, and Africa was a shithole without enough food to make proper shit, Middle East was an armed sandbox, we were all going to die of Aids anyway, and Flock Of Seagulls were in the charts. And we liked it!

24

Well, I’m 51 and I am about as depressed as I’ve ever been about the future.
All we need is for the bird flu to resurface and life would be perfect.

25

I’m not really old , but I can’t remember when shit was so scary. I am more scared for the children than myself. If pulling my head out of my ass will make it ANY better I’ll do it . I don’t think anybody needs shades.

26

Oh, Kee-rist, people.

You have a greater chance of living to see 100 today than any previous generation ever did. Sudden, inexplicable, painful death is exceedingly rare unless you’re an extra on House. What you’ll probably die of is a disease that no one had heard of thirty years ago because no one lived long enough to get it previously. And chances are, they’ll find a cure for it soon enough. Hell, even AIDS can be managed with the proper regimen.

You have at your disposal more items for less cost than any previous generation ever did, all designed to make your life easier. Your great-grandparents would have shit bricks at the idea of how easy it is to cook a good dinner, wash clothes, do house maintenance, etc. You have more leisure time than any previous generation, and there’s more good stuff out there to spend it on and more ways to find even better stuff to do! If you like television shows, not only do you have 587 channels to choose from, but you can get a Tivo or knockoff to record shows you’d never have a chance to see otherwise! If you like movies, you’re not restricted like your grandparents to whatever the local theater deigns to play; hell, you’re not even restricted to the crappy selection at your local video house. Just jump on Netflix and choose any goddamned movie ever made and swim in the cornucopia of eighty years of cinematic talent. Music? Sports? Hobbies? What ever you spend your “spare” time doing, not only can you spend more time doing it, now with the Internet so readily available, you can connect with other people who enjoy it, people who you never could have possibly met before. Hell, I wish I was 12 again so that I could learn about music and how to play the guitar from the massive libraries of information on-line rather than the pitiful crap selection my local public library had twenty years ago.

There is more freedom, less racism, and less homophobia than there ever was in this country before. Hell, the only reason you hear so much about how much fucking homophobia is in this country is because those people being oppressed feel safe and secure enough about their own basic rights that they’re willing to stand up and tell the rest of the country to fuck off. The fact that people are fighting about gay marriage right now isn’t a horrible sign of what horrible people we are, it’s a great sign that enough people see homosexuals as fellow human beings who deserve the same decency and rights as others that there’s a general fight over getting rid of homophobic laws. That’s not a sign of regression, it’s a sign of progress.

Yeah, sure, Bush is a dipshit. So was Jimmy Carter, fuck, he screwed up Iran which helped fuel the whole Islamic terror thing, he scattered about dangerously and incoherently during the Afghanistan crisis and pushed us closer to World War III. And you know what? We survived. We survived Nixon, Hoover, Harding, Wilson - we fucking survived Woodrow Wilson, who invaded Mexico, the Dominican Republic, and then drafted Americans into service and threw them into the fucking meatgrinder that was World War One.

And yet, and yet - we’re discovering all sorts of new ways to eradicate disease. People - credible fucking scientists with real fucking degrees - are working on teleportation. Despite the wailing of newsmagazines and the lies of research corporations, ever generation is getting smarter and more able to handle the world and its technology than the previous generation. We’re getting smarter, better, more tolerant and more culturally aware.

The future is full of beauty. The world is full of shit, but it’s less shitty than it was ten years ago, or twenty, let alone five hundred or one thousand.

“I decline to accept the end of man. It is easy enough to say that man is immortal because he will endure: that when the last ding-dong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking. I refuse to accept this. I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance.” - William Faulkner

27

It’s the conceit of every generation to think that they and they alone are living through The Worst Of Times. When I was born, the US was setting Vietnam on fire to save it, and Soviet tanks were rolling through Prague. When my father was born, the Luftwaffe was dropping bombs on Guernica. When my grandfather was born, The War To End All Wars was about to kick off. And so it goes: my son, when he grows up, will look back on Iraq and The War On Terror and compare it fondly with whatever is racking the planet.

And yet my grandfather was a frail and sickly man who died early from working in the Liverpool shipyards, and my grandmother scrubbed shitty dockside pubs for a living. Compare that with the comfort, privilege and security that I enjoy only seventy five years later - less than my life expectancy now - and I’m fairly optimistic about my son’s chances for the future, no matter what shit is going on in the world in twenty years time.

28

heh My stepfather’s parents, Mr. and Mrs. Wilson, somehow thought it would be a good idea to give him Woodrow as a middle name.

** applause **

29

Coulda been worse. Coulda been “Milhous”.

30

Not so much “the worst of times”, but, for me at least, I do boggle over why, given the well-documented trail of blood and destruction that is human history, we aren’t doing much better than we are. The answer seems to be because we never really learn.

The Cold War was in interesting period: A relatively calm few decades following two of the most deadly conflagrations in history, a period dominated by a kind of global equilibrium between two major alliances, which, if they ever engaged one another directly in hostilities, would completely destroy one another, leaving no victors. We did not fight because we could not fight.

Now the great East-West divide is dissolved, and the international scene much more fluid and chaotic, in terms of whose side any one nation is on. Wars are all small-scale and scattered around. Meanwhile, there are these new or emergent nuclear powers, too big to dispatch easily, too small to fully fit the calculus of mutual assured destruction, and willing, seemingly, to arm fighters not openly aligned with any state.

It’s a different sort of world we live in than when I grew up. More dangerous? Hard to say for sure. But certainly different.

31

Shit creek? Quite possibly. Why? The population explosion. That’s one of the things people were worrying about 30 years ago that’s still around, unlike the Warsaw Pact. The number of living humans has doubled since I was born.

Population pressure is driving all the big problems; nothing we do will fix things if population growth isn’t stopped or slowed way down. If I could, I’d sterilize everybody over the age of two.

32

Now that’s optimism! :slight_smile:

Or something . . .

33

Oh, great, then everybody born after the Day of Sterilization will spend their whole lives working 120-hour weeks to support the Retired Majority . . .

34

War! Terrorism! Bird flu! It’ll all look like Days of Wine and Roses when the oil runs out! :eek:

35

You think 2006 is bad?

Surely you remember a little decade? Called the 1970s? Now THERE was a decade where the world was going down the tubes. And we were thankful it wasn’t worse.

Kids today!

36

You’ve got to get with the program. The population bomb turned out to be a wet firecracker. The big worry in Europe, Japan, and other places is a population crunch with populations dwindling dramatically. The world average fertility rate today is 2.6 children per woman, which is half what it was in the 1950’s. And it’s still declining. We may actually see the global population begin to fall after 2050, after hitting a peak of about 9 billion.

37

True dat. For the foreseeable future, the real population-control challenge is gonna be, how do we coax the old folks onto the ice floes?

Floor open for suggestions! :slight_smile:

38

Peronally, I look forward to the oil running out - it’ll mean that the Middle East is no longer of strategic importance, we can quit meddling in it, and radical Islam will, if you’ll pardon the pun, run out of fuel. They can go back to squabling over their litterbox and no-one will care, like no-one cared before the internal combustion engine was invented and the Ottoman Empire was still making a bollocks of the place.

Anyway, the oil isn’t going to run out: it’ll get more expensive, sure, but that’ll just provide more impetus to increasingly turn to alternatives like bio-fuel, which haven’t been explored and developed sufficiently simply because oil was relatively cheap and there was no percentage in it. By the time oil becomes scarce enough to be too expensive to be worth extracting and using on a large scale, we won’t need it anymore.

Then, of course, the Midwestern farmers who produce the soybeans necessary to produce bio-diesel will hold all the economic power, and we can look forward to wars being fought in Kansas, North Dakota invading Soth Dakota, and Radical Christian splinter groups blowing up subways until The Republic Of California pulls its troops out of Nebraska.

39

Minor hijack: it annoys me when people treat “Cassandra” as a synonym of “Chicken Little.”

Cassandra was right.

40

Go back to hunting sperm whales for their oil, and use them as bait: two problems solved at a stroke. Of course, you’re assuming that there will still be ice-floes, what with global warming and all, but a swift nuclear winter will put paid to that. Nuke Iran and North Korea. Why does no-one think to put me in charge of these things?