Friday, June 05, 2015

When I Was Young





"In my lifetime, we've gone from Eisenhower to George W. Bush. We've gone from John F. Kennedy to Al Gore. If this is evolution, I believe that in twelve years, we'll be voting for plants." -- Lewis Black

I like Lewis Black, I'm always up for a good, over-the-top rant. However, in this particular case, putting the humor aside, I disagree with his observation.

Several years ago, I saw a video bit, probably on The Daily Show. There were clips of Hannity, O'Reilly, Limbaugh, Cavuto, Bachmann and Palin; all delivering basically the same line:

"When I was young, America was a better place." Or a safer place, happier place, blah-blah place."

The last one to speak was Glenn Beck; he was, of course, in tears over the direction that his Amerika had taken since his youth.

The punchline, delivered by someone other than John Stewart was:

"Of course, you saw the world in a different way. 
You were NINE!"

How many (white, upper middleclass) children were aware of:

The Cuban Missile Crisis
The Vietnam War
The Oil Embargo
The Pentagon Papers
Bosnia
A Middle-East War
Watergate
The next Middle-East Crisis
Three Mile Island
The Middle-East Crisis after the last one
Iranian Hostages
Chernobyl
Tiananmen Square
The Persian Gulf War (Iraq)
Somalia
Rwanda
O.J. Simpson

The OJ trial was 21 years ago. Add 10 years to that, ten years of age being the limit I'm placing on childhood. This means once you reach the age of 31, you're an idiot if you begin any sentence with the words "When I was growing up, America was a better place . . ."

How do I know? Well, I don't really, it's subjective, but you are reading my thoughts on my blog on the internet. Try doing that when you were ten.

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