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Conservatives want to decivilize America and they are succeeding [1]
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Date: 2023-03-29
Their children will have a better future than they have.
"Patriotism, religious faith, having children and other priorities that helped define the national character for generations are receding in importance to Americans," The Wall Street Journal's Aaron Zitner writes. "Tolerance for others, deemed very important by 80% of Americans as recently as four years ago, has fallen to 58%." The findings: NORC at the University of Chicago polled 1,019 adults this month by web and phone (margin of error: ±4%). Asked to describe the state of the nation's economy, 1% (not a typo) chose "excellent."
56% said a four-year college degree is "not worth the cost because people often graduate without specific job skills and with a large amount of debt."
33% said they have very little or no confidence in public schools. Look at the tectonic shifts from a Journal/NBC poll 25 years ago, in 1998: Patriotism is very important: Dropped from 70% to 38%.
Religion is very important: Dropped from 62% to 39%.
Having children is very important: Dropped from 59% to 30%.
Community involvement is very important: Dropped from 47% to 27%.
Money is very important: Rose from 31% to 43%.
Most of the people I know agree with these findings. The loss of civility in America has been recent and rapid. The reason for this shift has been blamed on video games, social media, single parent families and partisan politics. On the surface that seems logical, except all of these anomalies evolved as the deterioration progressed, so they cannot be the cause.
Is it possible that too many seismic changes happened at the same time and society could not assimilate them in an orderly fashion. These changes tented to roll out across society gradually, causing many of them to descent upon some segments of society simultaneously and abruptly. The early adaptors were able to manipulate or in many cases take advantage of the late adaptors maliciously or in just.
In today's society, the manipulators appear to have the upper hand. Rumors, falsehoods and malicious intent can be spread to millions of people worldwide for personal gain financially and in other forms of power. The same tools are available for reputing ill intended acts, but the speed at which they proliferate, makes it impossible to mitigate all possible damage.
The most egregious abuse of this phenomenon is in the world of politics, where those who seek our trust are engaging professional manipulator of the truth to distort facts and in many instances promote totally fabricated alternative realities.
The old adage “power corrupts,” is on display across all facets of our society with no visible means of reversing or slowing this trend down. I suspect that the generations’ born into this high stakes fast pace communications environment brains are hardwired from infancy to deal with it. I’m afraid that for the children of the 40s, 50s and 60s we will remain victims of our expectations.
*decivilize, to reverse civilization
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