Is everything always getting worse, or does it just always feel that way to everyone?

In My Humble Opinion
21

Plus ça change, plus c’est le meme chose.

“Youth today love luxury. They have bad manners, contempt for authority, no respect for older people and talk nonsense when they should work. Young people do not stand up any longer when adults enter the room. They contradict their parents, talk too much in company, guzzle their food, lay their legs on the table and tyrannise their elders.”

  • Socrates circa. 500 BC. A complaint about the young people in Athens

“This youth is rotten from the bottom of their heart. The young people are malicious and lazy. They will never be as youth was before. Our today’s youth will never be able to maintain our culture.”

  • Written on clay pots from ancient Babylon circa 1000 BC.

(According to this site anyway.)

22

The question is, why do you let crap live rent-free in your head? It’s not like we live in Communist Russia and we have to stand in line for six days to see the only kind of entertainment there is, which is the Alvin and the Chipmunks movie. If I didn’t hit Roger Ebert’s site once a week I wouldn’t even know there was an Alvin and the Chipmunks movie out. A DVR and Netflix will solve half of your problems right there - in other words, no, everything isn’t always getting worse, and you’ll only think that if you let obnoxious shit get to you. You need to be like the back of a duck and don’t let it touch you, not like a velvet shirt which catches all the lint.

23

“You nobles, you sons of my chiefs, you superfine dandies, you have trusted to your birth and your possessions and have set at naught my orders to your own advancement: you have neglected the pursuit of learning and you have given yourselves over to luxury and sport, to idleness and profitless pastimes.”

-Charlemagne

Remembered this quote from an old Medieval History class. Had to use it. (Superfine dandies?!)

24

Now that’s the kind of advice I can live with. You should be a counsellor. :slight_smile:

25

I was born in 1973 and it is amazing that almost everything has gotten better since then.

  1. Crime - Much improved and gang activity down after the early 90’s

  2. Food - Much better options. My wife’s family is a major importer/distributor of gourmet foods for the entire U.S. Their business expanded about 400% since the mid-90’s which is typical for that specialty, Everything specialty beer to cheese is way more accessible now than it was 20 years ago.

  3. Travel Options - Before airline deregulation, air travel was a big deal and a very expensive deal. Now it is cramped but affordable to most people.

  4. Racism - Better

  5. Sexism - Over half of medical school graduates today are women. In the 70’s, female doctors were a running joke on sitcoms.

  6. Style - Avocado green <> cool

  7. Education - Better (Many people won’t believe this one but all objective measures back this one up). IQ scores have been on the rise for decades as well as other standardized tests.

  8. Technology - better (obvious)

  9. World stability - better by far. The Cold War was not cool and we faced nuclear annihilation with half an hour’s notice at all times.

  10. The economy - better. The economy was a wreck from the late 60’s - Early 80’s

  11. The environment - better. Most people can’t even imagine that if you go back to 1900 or so that the environment is so much better now that it was then. Our predecessors were masters at clear cutting whole states and having belching vehicles and factories.

26

I tend to look around me and think, “Man, I wish I were a kid today.”

I think it’s a thrilling time to be alive.

27

Abraca Deborah ia the coolest username I have seen for a while. :smiley:

28

Your problem, and I hope I’m not stepping over the line here, is that you overreact to everything. It’s a shitty movie that I hope people will ignore, and it bothers me that some dopes will probably get rich from it. And yeah, I was a little astonished that they put the shit joke in there.
But other than the Hollywood trend of turning mediocre TV series into unwatchable movies, this does not say anything about “our culture” or “everything getting worse.”

I don’t think everything is getting worse. All things considered I’m having a great time, and pop culture and movies are not a factor. In fact, they’re easily ignored if you just ignore them instead of scratching that sore spot over and over again, as some people do. A lot people do react very poorly to changes in culture. It doesn’t look like it’s any fun. Don’t be one of those people.

29

Just from a pop culture standpoint, you honestly think radio, movies, music and TV was better in the past? Sure, there was lots of good stuff being produced in the old days. Classic movies, classic music, classic TV shows. But what you don’t remember is the crap that surrounded those classics.

Take a look at top 40 music listings from today and you’ll realize that it’s almost all forgettable crap that no one will remember five minutes from now, let alone 20 years from now. And then look over your collection of music from the 80s, 70s, and 60s and think, man, they sure don’t make music like they used to.

Except take a look at the top 40 music listings from the 80s, the 70s, the 60s. And you’ll find that you’re familiar with almost none of it, because it was crap with a small admixture of decent music, and an infintesimal scattering of good music. People in the 70s didn’t listen to classic rock from the 70s. They listened to disco, they listened to novelty hits, they listened to syrupy ballads, if they listened to pop music they listened to mostly crap. The stuff people really listened to was gawdawful, only tolerable as nostalgia and only if you grew up with it.

Crap is thrown away, and we remember the good stuff. Casablanca is a good movie, how many other of the hundreds of movies made in the 40s do you watch every year?

And by the way, how in God’s green hell could you go to Alvin and the Chipmunks and NOT KNOW IT WAS GONNA BE A CRAP MOVIE AHEAD OF TIME?

You honestly went to Alvin and the Chimpmunks expecting a movie that wouldn’t make you vomit? Because that’s the best review I would expect: This movie wasn’t so bad I threw up. You knew it was gonna be crap, yet you went anyway. And this when there are dozens of good movies playing in theaters. You chose to see Alvin and the Chipmunks. This is your crime. It is also your punishment.

30

I was contemplating this thread as I walked into the office across the hall to get a printout. They were listening to Christmas music in there. The current song was Jingle Bells with the barking dogs.

That came out around the same time as Frampton and the Bee Gees did the Sgt. Pepper movie.

Debbie Boone was lighting up our lives. The Bay City Rollers were making us belive in magic. The Captain & Tennielle couldn’t stop dancing.

Truly, it was the golden age of pop culture.

Perhaps the pinnacle of those days was a progressive art pop song called Telephone Man. I’d take a shit-eating chipmunk over that any day.

31

He saw the trailer, not the movie. I’ve had to sit through it a few times myself. They have the Chipmunks eating shit and singing “Funkytown.” It deserves an award for Outstanding Achievement in the Field of Unbelievable Annoyingness.

32

I just got Mr. Neville a new cookbook for Hanukkah. One notable fact that I remember from it is that it said even the cheap supermarket extra virgin olive oil is better than any olive oil you could have gotten at any price in this country 20 years ago. You can get salsa and soy sauce in the grocery store even in a small, backward town like the one where my parents live.

Car travel options are better, too. The car is, of course, much safer than it was then, with newer safety features. There are also fewer drunk drivers on the road. The experience in the car is better than it would have been, too- air conditioning and a CD player are pretty much standard, so you’re not so much at the mercy of the weather or the local radio stations.

Prejudice against members of religious minorities is better now, too.

Definitely. And the really scary part is that it could have happened as a result of an accident or equipment malfunction.

You can see evidence of this here in Pittsburgh. Mr. Neville and I saw two old houses next to each other that started out the same color. One had been cleaned since the bad old days of air pollution problems, one hadn’t- the one that hadn’t been cleaned was a lot darker in color.

The Chipmunks deserve a lifetime achievement award in that category.

33

In Communist Russia, Chipmunk watches YOU.

34

Oh yes, and you might want to ask a few people who were living in Communist Eastern Europe whether things are better now than they were in the 1970s…

35

I’m almost twice the age of the OP, and I agree. For me, though, it’s not so much that pop culture is getting worse (although the fact that there are enough people who care so much about peeking at the rich and famous to keep the paparazzi in business is pretty sad), but that more serious things aren’t getting any better.

It really depresses me that with all of our other advances, we still have significant numbers of people who can’t accept the simple fact of evolution, and whose minds have been so poisoned that they feel that teaching it to our children is some sort of a threat to their religious beliefs. It’s very sad to me that there are people who are so ignorant, dumb, stupid, and blind as to honestly belief that creationism (in whatever guise) is anything close to valid science.

It depresses me that there are still so many people who believe that the private sexual practices of people they don’t even know and will never meet are somehow threatening to them. It saddens me that there are still people who believe expanding the legal definition of marriage to include people of the same sex can possibly have any effect on their own marriage, or the marriage of any other couple. It saddens me that people in positions of power can still believe that allowing a homosexual man to openly serve in the US military is somehow dangerous.

There are also a few things that do seem to be escalating in recent years: It depresses me that there are more and more people who believe that the right way to secure better rights for animals is to deprive human beings of their rights, and that they somehow have some twisted way of making that blatant hypocrisy justifiable in their addled brains.

36

VCO3, go to this location on TwistedTunes. Scroll down to “Chipmunks Roasting On An Open Fire”. Crank the speakers up and enjoy.

37

My mom’s from Pittsburgh. When she was a kid in the 50’s, my grandma washed the curtains every week. She had to, because they turned gray. Every week. Mom and her sister used to love to watch them pouring slag on the heaps at night. All things are most certainly not getting worse. (Of course, then again, people in Pittsburgh used to have jobs, too.)

38

I was 26 when Star Wars came out, and it was damn cool - and most people thought so. It might seem less so now since there are so many copies, but it was a true gosh-wow moment.

As for Alvin, bad movies will always be with us. As a teenager I saw Dr. Strangelove, but I also paid good money to see McHale’s Navy meets the Air Force. Baird Searles said that the golden age of science fiction was 13, perhaps the golden age of everything is 13.

39

But I think that even the nature of that crap is more noble than the nature of our current crap. I guarantee the worst show that aired alongside Taxi looks like Cheers compared to Yes Dear or Two and a Half Men.

40

:stuck_out_tongue:

Aw shucks… thanks!

It was a nick name my first university sweetheart gave to me a number of years ago. It comes from that pop 80’s song which had a chorus that went “Abra abra cadabra, I wanna reach out and grab ya…” :wink:

Now that song is stuck in my head…

/end threadjack