Can we all just stop for a second and appreciate what a crazy fucking time it is to be alive in this country?

Absolutely. And in so many way. I’m only in my 40s and I feel like I’m living in a vastly different world than the one I was born into.

The rate of change is unlike anything humans have ever had to cope with in our 2 million year history.

For almost all of human existence, there wasn’t even a CONCEPT of progress… no sense that humanity was going anywhere. Your life was virtually identical to that of your great great great grandfather, and would be the same experience had by your great great great grandchild.

I remember a world of rotary phones, small towns with personalities before chains homogenized the world. I remember how the United States had a whole different personality before 9-11. I remember when Republicans had actual plans for governing (OBAMA’S affordable care act was basically a clone of Bob Dole’s plan). I remember the world before the Internet, when malls were packed and buzzing, when shopping in stores felt magical and not like a ghost town.

I remember analog and even black and white TVs. I remember the first video games and PCs,b dial-up Internet, browsers before tabs were invented.

I remember when acid rain was there number one environmental concern, and how we actually accepted the science and made policy to fix it.

I remember the bugs.

I remember so many more bugs. The night alive with fireflies. Windshields plastered with splatters on the highway.

I remember paper maps! FM radio. Cassette adapters.

The world is so, so, so different. It changed so fast.

Republicans became a suicide cult.

The government stopped breaking up monopolies, and started bailing out too-big-to-fail banks.

The United States tortures people now. People never charged of a crimes were tortured at Guantanamo Bay.

I grew up in a home that my parents bought cheap. They had two cars. They took us on vacations every year. They saved up for retirement. My dad had a PhD. He did well.

I have a law degree. I will never own a home. I will never be able to afford even a single vacation. I will never be able to retire.

They rolled back Roe.

They staged an insurrection.

I’ve been working with GPT-4 night and day since it was released to the public. I’m 100 percent convinced that with a little supplementation, it is the first artificial GENERAL intelligence.

It can already create better writing and code than MOST of the human population.

Where will it be in 5 years? 10? 20?

It’s going to be smarter, funnier, more creative, more thoughtful than all of us. In our lifetime. WHY, then, are we even HERE at that point? Why do we even exist?

These were questions for science fiction. For the future.

It’s happening NOW. WE, of all humans in the span of history, are the ones who will see our species become obsolete.

So yeah. Let’s take moment to realize how cosmically, historically insane it is to live in this moment.

As someone who was in first grade when the towers went down; how did the country’s personality change from your view?

The clearest way I can illustrate this is that after Pearl Harbor was attacked, FDR have his famous speech which carried foremost the message: “we have nothing to fear but fear itself”.

Contrast that to Bush’s message, which was, essentially: Be afraid! Give up your liberty for (the illusion of) security!

For years it was: If you see something suspicious, call the cops! Let the government inspect you if you want to ride the subway! (But only at some stops. Terrorists, please don’t walk a block down to the next station!). If you really want to help, spend money buying whatever! Take off your shoes to board a plane! Our government recommends you buy a bunch of hardware to protect your home against chemical weapons and dirty bombs!

Or: oh, hey, we invented a color-coded system to tell you how scared you should be all the time! (Pay no attention to the fact that we’ll go on high sheet every time my administration comes under scrutiny for anything!)

Or: hey, we can label ANYONE we want as “ENEMY COMBATANTS” and they will have NO RIGHTS and we will torture them.

What changed was that Bush’s administration used inflated fear of terrorism as a means of control. And if you voted against something in Congress… say, a war with Iraq (who had NOTHING TO DO with 9-11) you were branded as unpatriotic, and you got death threats.

I think American citizens of Japanese descent would disagree with your good old days assessment of how Americans were treated by their own government during WW2. They certainly had their liberty and livelihoods taken from them. Furthermore people of color in general were still under the thumb of institutionalized racism that continues to this day. Do you believe they were better off back then too?

You’re talking about oppression of minorities, and no one is going to argue that that was unconscionable. But I’m referring to the character if America as a whole. No part of our population was untouched by the darkness of the Bush administration.