The Loss Of Civility
I loathe romanticizing the past. With everyone fretting over the loss of civility in political discourse, I'm wondering when it ever existed. Genocide, slavery, civil war, labor struggles, assassinations--when exactly were people who disagreed with each other so nice?
The shrill do seem to dominate the discussion more these days but I put the blame squarely on YouTube and Cable News. If those two things existed in previous eras, who knows what wouldn't have been accomplished. 75% of television news coverage has become pointing out someone's dumb remarks and discussing whether they should apologize or not.
Wednesday: The Honor Of Heterosexuality
posted by Matt Bors at
4:19 PM
5 Comments:
yep,
Nothing like the old civility in the Senate (unless you count Charles Sumner being thrashed with a cane by a pro-slavery colleague civil)
Why in fact, wasn't it a CIVIL war?
Aah the good old days.
Now bipartisan cooperation- that's a thing of the past I could use.
Two- friggin' -shay!!
All we know is what we know. I recall somewhere that America is too young of a country and doesn't have a sense of history.
We cannot judge things based on our little brief period of time. When people make the argument about things being harder on kids growning up today, I think back to 'The Jungle' and the scenes in Tom Sawyer that I am glad that I could eat my bowl of Frosted Flakes and walk to school, instead of living.
Pedophilia ... yeah, THAT'S new ... NOT ..! I could go on and on ... but I won't. The more we think things have change, the more we should realize that they haven't.
The automatic loathing of romanticizing the past is itself a cliche. When I hear people make knee-jerk commentary that "things were always this way", it makes me sick.
Get a brain. Think. It actually works.
"When I hear people make knee-jerk commentary that "things were always this way", it makes me sick."
Things weren't always this way. They were way worse.
People born in a certain era would have seen a civil war and three presidents assassinated. It must have felt like America was falling apart. I'm sure we are much more civil these days. We just emphasize unruly protesters, congressmen and bloggers.
I always thought things were so much more civil back in the early 1960s when I was a kid in the USA, when there were neat 'white' and 'colored' labels for things like restaurants and drinking fountains. It made it so much less stressful for blackfellas when they had to keep whitey in line when abusing facilities meant only for people of color.
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