Comments by "Digital Footballer" (@digitalfootballer9032) on "\"History Comes In Patterns\" Neil Howe: Civil War, Market Crashes, and The Fourth Turning | PBD #441" video.

It was before my time, but modern day feels like the late 60's. My parents were young adults at that time. My dad was overseas in the Air Force from '66-'70, so he wasn't around during this time, but my mom was and she always talks about how modern day reminds her so much of the late 60's. The anything goes attitude, the protests, the conflicts. Maybe she is correct? I was born in '76. The 1980's to me was great because I was very young and the late 80's to early 90's were my teenage years. I thought they were pretty good times but I was young so take it with a grain of salt. In hindsight however, I do get your sentiment on that time period. I thought all that controversial stuff was "cool" at the time because I was 13 😂
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Pretty much everything Thomas Sowell says is spot on. He is generational brilliance. We are very fortunate he has lived such a long life to be around and give us such great insight into the economic and political world. People like him are disappearing and aren't being replaced. Let's enjoy every wise word this man gives us while he is still with us.
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We are the black sheep generation. Outshined by the boomers and the millennials and all their issues. We just exist. And I'm okay with that 😂
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Strong men create good times...good times create weak men...weak men create bad times ...bad times create strong men. Rinse and repeat...ad infinitum.
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Doesn't matter how overused or clichè that line is, it's still true, has been true for all of civilization, and will continue forever. It's how humans are wired. Things get good and easy and we get complacent, and by default complacency will begin to make everything rot, then things go downhill, we panic, we suffer for a time, then we dig in and correct it. I don't care who it is, we are all guilty of complacency. This is why things like communism and Keynesianism only work on paper and not in reality. Both systems rely on the people (in the case of communism) or the government (in the case of Keynesianism) working to full capacity even when the times are good. We all know it never actually happens like that. People: "ah, production is booming, I can let off the gas a little and everyone else will pick up the slack". Government : "ah, the economy is booming, no need to put that surplus towards paying down the debt".
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I think us Gen Xers like Howe's work so much because we are the outsider generation. All this crazy stuff happening around us all the time, and we just plug along and exist. Books like his give us some insight into how all the other lunatics work! I mean, our generational counterpart was the "forgotten generation" of the late 1800's and early 1900's. My great grandparents generation. I only ever got to know one out of eight great grandparents, my great grandmother Mildred, born in '01, died in '84. She really connected with all of us great grandkids, we were all generation X. My one cousin that is a millennial was born after she died.
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My mom graduated high school in '62, so was a young adult during your childhood. She frequently compares today to the political turbulence of the 1960's and early 70's. I always say she's crazy, it's much worse now, but then again I wasn't around then. Maybe she's spot on. Maybe we are headed for another golden era like the 1980's. Let's hope.
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@s.muller8688 Maybe so but it's a very accurate proverb. You can go back as far as civilization itself and see this pattern repeat over and over again. And it's never going to stop. It's human nature, it's complacency when times are easy and sacrifice when times are hard, is how we roll.
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@marygoff3332 Native New Yorker here. We suffer from the same assumptions by outsiders. Everyone outside of maybe a few neighboring states thinks NY state = NY city. It doesn't. Not even close. Anyone from West of about Westchester county is like from a different planet than the city and it's surroundings. Heck, even long Islanders are quite different. New York state, by population is a very blue state. New York state, by area is a very red state. New York has 63 counties including the 5 borroughs of NYC. Typical 7-10 are are solid blue voters and the rest red. The far western part of the state where I live is more Republican than Texas. And even the Democrats, mostly in the cities like Buffalo, Rochester, and Syracuse, are like old fashioned conservative Democrats from the 1950's and 60's. New York is like two different worlds joined together. Unfortunately for us rural folk, the city dominates everything politically and crams it down the rest of our collective throats.
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@kuninagako9035 It is, but it's inevitable. It's just a matter of where are you in life when it happens because it happens roughly once per four generations. It's funny how accurate it is as well, as someone born in the late 70's and schooled in the 80's and early 90's, they always told us the next big conflict or disaster would happen when we are middle aged. We're in our 40's now and it appears to be right around the corner.
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It's amazing how it has all changed so much just in the last 20 years or so. I went to state college and graduated in 2000. Sure, I had profs on the right, the left, and everywhere in between, but none of them disparaged our country, and all of them encouraged lively debate, even if they disagreed with you. Still to this day one of my favorite professors was about as far to the left as you can get, and I myself am pretty solidly right wing. We used to argue and debate up a storm, but always shook hands at the end and were friendly. He would even comment to me about as much as he (somewhat jokingly) hated to give me a good grade on something he totally disagreed with, he would say he had no choice because I was able to back up my position so well. Virtually no modern professor would do that. It's agree lockstep with them or fail. It's actually a travesty of higher learning.
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I know it's harder in reality than on paper to do, but judges really should be impartial. Yes, just about everyone favors one political side over another, but at the very least any judge who clearly has a history of donating to one side and has family members involved with that side should be excused from any trial involving anyone or anything political in nature. Any judge worth his salt would have recused themselves. But that's not how we play anymore and it's not a good sign for this country.
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There are inherent rights and wrongs from an ethical standpoint, regardless of what the current beliefs and norms are. But in this age of hyper narcissism, people have seemed to forget about this.
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To be fair, probably everyone throughout history thought their time of crisis was the worst it could ever be. It's always much worse when you are experiencing it, to just read about long dead ancient people dealing with crisis just doesn't register the same way. Don't get me wrong, times are not great, things are bad and are going to get worse, but the worst ever, I don't know. I would think the Civil war was a pretty bad one. It took a long time for the country to recover from. Or go back further to when the Roman empire was sacked and crumbled, it out the entire civilized world into centuries of dark times.
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Born in '76 here, towards the end of generation X. Had a similar childhood to everyone here born in the 80's. What I find interesting is whenever I engage a young person in conversation about how stuff was "back in my day", rather than getting the expected "ok old man, you're boring", I get many times a young person of 18-19 years old fascinated with my era and wishing they could have experienced it. They hate that they are slaves to their technology. They are genuinely interested in the way things were back in the days of landlines and antenna TV and no internet. Maybe there is hope. Maybe this upcoming crop of young people will actually end the madness of modernity and "dial it back" a bit to simpler times. One can hope, anyways.
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Could be more than a decade. Things turned around quickly after the last time of great crisis (great depression + WWII), but the one before that (Civil war) took a long time to recover from.
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Just turned 48 today. Nothing like a world crisis right during your midlife crisis, but hey ho I would expect nothing less for generation X. Life is a literal sh*t sandwich for us...good on both ends and a giant turd in the middle (assuming we get out of this crisis and hit good times again in our twilight years) 😂
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And sadly, as they die off, there seems to be less interest in the war and that time period. I grew up with two grandfathers that served in WWII and used to tell us stories about it. I have always been fascinated with it and still am to this day. I have all their medals and memorabilia from the war, including many Axis pieces my one grandfather received from prisoners as deputy warden of a pow prison. My other grandfather was nearly killed (inches from being ejected when the plane took enemy fire) in a USAAF plane over the Pacific and he didn't really like to talk about it, and consequently never flew in an airplane the rest of his life. When my boys are older I will share all of the stories with them, and pass on the memorabilia.
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@HangTogether2 We are the forgotten generation, reborn. Those from the late 1800's and early 1900's. Strauss knew this when the media labeled us as slackers. We are just calculated. We sit back and take it all in. We don't stir the pot, but we don't let others walk all over us either. Our counterpart won the Great War as teenagers and struggled through the great depression as middle aged adults. They parented the heroes of WWII. They retired when the world was turned in it's head in the 60's. They quietly existed but made a big difference. Wouldn't be such a a bad path for us. We are already the forgotten heroes of the Gulf wars, the kids who grew up to be the first adult generation to go digital and experience the internet and wide usage of cellphones, not to mention the first kids to use early PCs in school. We've lived through major world changes just as our counterparts did. They were my great grandparents. I only ever knew one of mine. I hope we are destined to have our children be the next heroes to get us out of the coming crisis. I think it's people like our generation, the cool minded, calm collected folks that need to be the ones to parent the future heroes. We ourselves may not be the dynamic hero archetype, but we serve our purpose as the mentors of them, and we have learned from the mistakes of all the crazies before us 😂
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