Did everything decline after the 60s?
the sixties were great, I guess, but it's over.
After the 1960s ended, there was nothing sustaining the American mind. Everybody started to go downhill immediately. That was 1970. The thing is not sustained all by itself. You need a cultural support system. You need support from a culture. If you have that sort of thing. If you have one. So. I know that Gore Vidal said the U.S. does not have a culture (at all), okay, but I think that it did, but what it did have was present only until the sixties faded. Once that was over there was nothing, and so nothing to support healthy minds / mental health. And as a result, on this important parameter of psychological well-being, Americans’ capacity to engage in community support declined. As a result they became parasitic towards others instead of helpful or supportive towards others.
The importance of cultural support should be noted. The kind of support is necessary. Our existence as a social group needs it.
Even if the sixties were over, the people of the US could count on a government that was basically sincere. Couldn’t we? For another ten years. Yes. The government still had an active goodwill towards the American people. That declined too; it is over, it is gone. What's next? No bread? I predict a big surprise — when we find out capitalism does not just work all by itself. At that point there will be no functioning capitalistic economic processes. So what system will we have then? You will not be able to get food. No bread in the grocery store.
Hospitals are deeply suspect. I saw the problem when I had to go to an emergency room. I have seen how care takers are dehumanized. It was really not so good at that hospital. I am curious why there were as many heavily-armed security personnel as nurses, walking around. Why would they do that? It must be that they know exactly what they are doing—and what they want is to protect themselves against anyone who rebels. Practically, the result is that patients are not cared for. How can they be cared for if they are also expected to shut up? They are supposed to shut up and accept whatever happens. What happened, mostly, is that patients were waiting all day. I spoke to someone who was waiting who had waited the previous day—and was back! I noted a whole list of things that were stupid (this is at a second emergency room, Florida.)
What is important to the hospital is not persons’ health. Rather, what is important is who is in charge. How does one maintain control? The method is to deceive patients. I told them I was in serious danger of hypothermia and I got a doctor who "explained" to me what hypothermia is. How would I know? I didn’t need any explanation. It is horrific. I was already feeling it in the early stage. What am I? Stupid? I cannot know? But doctor know? This is when the core of the body be losing ability to maintain heat. Such a condition is unnatural. The body core should not be cold. So the doctor told me I did not have it; and maybe by then I didn’t. They threw me back into the street. I was homeless; they didn’t care at all about that. They cared that nobody was paying. The doctors don't care about patients' health. They care about running an orderly facility in which they are in control and these patients, you know, they also need to be under control. The ones who are not being cared for should not be able to make problems. What matters is the hospital. Such an important source of spiritual healing.
That and money. You will see, if you go to the hospital, that the main concern is that you will not have power to interfere with their lack of skill. They is not any good at all, at treatment. So the concern is that you should not find out about that. They are not letting you know they lack skill. Treating problems is hard, so it is better to concentrate on having total control over those persons who are admitted, so they don’t make trouble. Not allowing any of them to complain. That is the main thing for the hospitals. (That and money, but I already said that.)
Other than myself and a few others who may try speaking out there isn’t a huge amount of discussion. There is no discussion of this and many other matters affecting the psychological as well as physical health of Americans. Substack is a place to discuss it. Even so, the way the managers of Substack are behaving (stuck on a business model) makes it more difficult.
We got through the seventies in one piece. With the eighties came the start of a long losing streak. I am disillusioned. This long decline is something we can see, more often than not. It may be seen. Life is not that easy to negate. This is something that many persons have now become more able to clearly see and feel. But are you still in denial?
I mean the sixties were great …sure
I guess it WAS!!!
HI EVERYBODY. I cleaned up the first paragraph, so please try again.
The ‘60s were a time when the generation that lived through the Depression and WWII were able to become wealthier than the previous generation. Labor unions were at their strongest. Social revolution was flourishing in politics, human rights, education, the arts. People began to question social hierarchies and ingrained beliefs.
All of that began to change in the ‘70s. With the Kent State shootings campus and, by extension, social protests vaporized. The end of the Vietnam War in 1975, ironically, proved the death knell for the peace movement. Black rights, hard fought for years, were blunted by the FBI’s systematic hunting down and suppression of those who spoke out. The American Indian Movement was frozen in its tracks with the Wounded Knee prosecutions.
The ‘80s, with Reagan’s ‘trickle down’ economics and the stagflation during the first part of the decade severely eroded the purchasing power US citizens, particularly through labor unions,had fought for since the Molly Malloys of the early 1880s. Reagan’s busting of the air traffic controllers union sent a green light to industry to crush the very concept of a unionized labor force. The rise of the Moral Majority through people such as Jerry Falwell began chipping away at the rights both minorities and the Boomers had achieved. They were instrumental in, among other things, in stopping the passage of the Equal Rights Amendment.
But the final nail in the coffin didn’t occur until the 1992 presidential campaign when then Governor Clinton declared that, in order to win against George Herbert Bush, he was going to out-Republican the Republican Party. At that point the neoliberal establishment was born. People who had always looked to the Democrats as the party of progress were now faced with two parties as similar as Tweedledum and Tweedledee.
To this day the Clintons still control the direction and the thinking of the group.