You forgot to type in CAPS and use 3 exclamation points.
I hope you don’t home school your kids, 'cause I can see part of the problem if you do.
I’m trying to picture a crying Indian commercial except with a crying white guy. 
Here’s the incredible bit of hubris that leads to everything else you say in this thread:
You say that IF you had been alive 100 years ago, you would have been able to predict the future (that is, our current situation) with absolute perfect accuracy. So therefore, you are now able to predict our situation 100 years from now with accurate perfect accuracy.
I’d like to see some evidence of the former before I can accept the latter.
I don’t believe that anybody 100 years ago correctly predicted what life would be like now, and NOBODY can predict what life will be like 100 years from now.
Wait, what? Are you trying to claim that you are NOT characterizing it as a bad thing?
Piffle. Why else would you give it a place on your list of “Ways in which the USA will have become a third-world shithole by the end of the century?”
P.S. If the USA is the dystopia you’re projecting, why will you be expecting furriners to continue immigrating to it?
Best I can tell, the U.S. is awesome but delicate. Specifically, maintaining the right ratio of righteous white Christians to dirty brown furriners is hard.
gee…it’s so easy have 20/20/ hindsight.
So your relatives never doubted whipping Hitler…but most Americans did. They refused to get involved (until Pearl Harbor). Most Americans were so full of doubts about fighting Hitler that they didnt even want to let our allies in England fight for us.(they opposed the lend-lease act)
Your grandfather may have seen a VERY!! bright future in1900. But how about in 1929? Most Americans had totally lost hope for the future by then.
But they didn’t complain about it on internet message boards 
They just slugged it out, raised loving families, and somehow life went on.
Tarwater, I’d like to apologize for my part in this hijack of the thread. I thought your question was a good one.
Social conservatism is declining actually, the younger generations are less likely to support it and conservatives are more focussed on economic issues nowadays.
Someone should tell the ostensible leaders.
True - I guess social conservatives are just a lot louder than I remember. Still, the elderly constitute much of the voting bloc and stand to grow far larger as a population in the coming years. Given that many elderly individuals tend to vote republican, that worries me.
I think Susanann is saying that by that time, all our base are not belong to us.
IANAParent, but I have a nephew/godson and a niece, siblings. The nephew takes after me in a ridiculous amount of things, from hobbies (we’re both into jigsaws, which neither of his parents or other uncles liked; both early readers) to physical things (“wonder where did The Kid get that strange bent to his little fingers” - laying down my hands on the table so the pinkies rest on the ring fingers “gee, Mom, I have no idea!” - “:eek:”).
I worry that their mother will never forgive my nephew for being born a boy, against her plans (she’s a lot like my own mother, who still hasn’t forgiven me for being a girl and I’m 43). I worry that being smart and thus faster at many things than many of his peers will combine with the perfectionism he’s learned from both parents and lead to him abandoning too quickly anything which is difficult (his Daddy saw the danger this would happen and has been working with the kid to avoid it). I used to worry that he would end being, like his Auntie, one of the loners: nope, him and his BFF are the class leaders (
).
I worry that the little one, who’s got her parents so twisted around her fingers it’s not funny, will end up a tyrant. She’s ridiculously good at figuring out who can she twist and who can’t she, though, so that’s that: looks like she’ll be a tyrant only if she ends up in a situation in which tyrant-doom is the most advantageous behavior. Kid’s so socially-smart that Littlebro and I really, really mean it when we tell her parents to get her into politics.
I do hope we’ll be able to raise them to be happy, and helpful, and good people. If there ever comes a point where things get bad for them at home they’ll be welcome to talk with me and, if it’s that bad, to move in with me: I hope things never do get that bad (I don’t think my sister in law will be happy if either kid wants to study something that’s not considered in her Master Plan, for example, or if either one turns out to be gay or discovers (s)he’s not Catholic). But I don’t give a shit about which particular professions they choose, or which hobbies they have, or anything like that, so long as they’re happy and good folk. I might be more nervous if they happened to be my biokids, but I doubt it - it was me who convinced my parents to not try and choose the Bros majors for them, after all (I’d had a horrible time with that).
I don’t particularly want to get in the way of this train wreck but I just HAD to ding that middle part there.
150 years ago the majority of the nation thought that the nation would not exist as a whole in short form. Even those most in the ‘firebrand abolitionist’ camp assumed that the south would be able to make good on secession.
150 years ago was 1861 and the entire country east of the Mississippi was about to go into the fire.
Fire is bright. Duh.
AND those damn Irish immigrants were creating a crisis. They were inferior to our original European stock, lazy, uneducated, and poor.
Sometimes, History is really seems more a case of mad-libs.
Possibly. But we are in severe economic times, so it is hard not to focus on economics first. That doesn’t mean social issues are gone, they just aren’t as pertinent at the moment.
Either way, one of the first things the GOP did after taking over the house was try to pass an anti-abortion bill. I don’t know what is going on in all 50 states, but the first things the GOP tried to do were pass anti-abortion laws, repeal health reform and cut various programs they dislike for political reasons.
Plus despite the argument that their motive is economics, the reason the federal House of reps is going after groups like NPR is because NPR has a liberal bias. So that is a social issue (the concept of media bias).
Younger generations are less likely to support it. But younger generations don’t support most of the things that conservative republicans support (putting faith over science, rejecting the international community, social heirarchies based on race or class, religion, etc) but it doesn’t seem to matter. Lindsay Graham has urged the GOP to support climate change legislation to appeal to youth, Megan McCain urges them to support gay righst for the same reason but it doesn’t seem to be sticking.