hi OP. Hey i am 66 (I still can't believe that number, haha. Luckily I am still super healthy). I was in 2nd grade when president Kennedy was shot in the head, live on national television. His brain flew out into his wife's lap. It set off a wave of assassinations (president's brother, MLK, etc.
I grew up knowing that the yellow and black triangles symbol meant "fallout shelter" and we were supposed to go there in case of nuclear attack. We did "duck and cover" drills in elementary school. Hide under your desks. Once, they sent us home with pamphlets about nuclear attack preparation. OK don't laugh, the pamphlet said "wear loose white clothing in case of nuclear detonation. Don't look directly at the explosion." They flew warplanes overhead once per week after bedtime, faster than the speed of sound, and we would hear the "sonic boom" which scared the crap out of me. It rattled the windows, shook the house. People were truly panicked, using their life savings to dig holes in their backyard, and building and equipping "bomb shelters" to try to survive nuclear fallout. It didn't feel like that stuff was ever resolved, it just faded from attention, it was buried by other distractions both negative and positive.
Wasn't too much later the government had a giant meltdown that scared the crap out of everyone. It was right as I came of voting age, haha! Oh my god. Watergate, it was called. Huge corruption scandal, everyone was just breathless with shock and disgust and fear. At that time people around me trusted the government to be solid enough to remain (seemingly) just, and we learned it could seemingly recover, at least back then.
Around this time we were also in a totally illegal war, and we had a freaking lottery to decide which 18-year-olds would be forced to go fight the Viet Cong in the jungles of southeast asia. High school grads coming back in body bags, kids running away to Canada to avoid getting roped into the army. And hippies happened, communes, free love, weed -- all of which caused the older ones to lose their minds because society looked to them to be coming apart.
Some of us died. Most of us lived. You are living the stories you will tell young people, when its your turn to comfort them.
None of this is to minimize what you are sensing around you! You are awake and aware, you are not overreacting. I am so sorry. I wish I could just listen to you for a couple hours. You are having one of those wakeup moments. We all will be each having our own wakeup moments. Our job is to comfort each other when we feel like this. We will all adapt and do our human best to cope with whats coming. Help each other not freeze in place, but take the most intelligent and resourceful steps we can muster. The system is unable to help, its unreliable)
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(highlight:: There have always been people in the world who felt like it was "going to hell in a hand basket." But if you could survey everybody and put their responses on a bell curve, you'd probably have more negative viewpoints right now. It wouldn't be a nice even distribution, I don't think. I don't know enough about statistical analysis to say how many deviations would qualify this current situation as an outlier.
We definitely have serious challenges, but the other thing worth considering is that there have always been serious challenges and times of great upheaval throughout history. What's hard to figure out, for me, is how the impact of modern technology amplifies the signal of all that bad stuff and makes it seem much worse in our minds.
When I was 8 years old, I lived in a house that did not have cable TV or internet. We had an antenna on the roof that got TV reception for about five or six channels. That's all we had. And back then, the news was reported once in the morning, once at dinner time, and one final time late at night.
So when something awful happened, like the attempted assassination of President Reagan, you only heard about it three or four times a day, and that was if you were checking TV, radio, and newspapers. The flow of information was slower.
Now, when something bad happens, you marinate in it all day long. They replay it endlessly on TV, it's on the internet 24 hours a day. The signal is way, way more powerful. That has to have an effect on us psychologically.
Again, we definitely have big big problems. I don't want to minimize them in any way. I'm trying to figure out how we differentiate our perception of previous awful things from current awful things.
How do we compare living through the pandemic to living through the black plague?How do we compare living in the information age to living through the industrial revolution?How do we compare living in a time of mass shootings to living in the time of the Civil War or WWII when so many young people lost their lives?
It's all suffering, right? Victor Frankl wrote in "Man's Search for Meaning" that human beings have a tendency to compare their suffering to the suffering of others, like placing weights on a scale to see which outweighs the other. He suggested that suffering is like a gas, rather than a solid, and our bodies are the container. The gas expands to fill the container, no matter what. That has always stuck with me.)
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